--We present a deep reinforcement learning-based framework for autonomous microgrid management. Using deep reinforcement learning and time-series forecasting models, we optimize microgrid energy dispatch strategies to minimize costs and maximize the utilization of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Our approach integrates the transformer architecture for forecasting of renewable generation and a proximal-policy optimization (PPO) agent to make decisions in a simulated environment. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in both energy efficiency and operational resilience when compared to traditional rule-based methods. This work contributes to advancing smart-grid technologies in pursuit of zero-carbon energy systems. We finally provide an open-source framework for simulating several microgrid environments.

Language use changes over time, and this impacts the effectiveness of NLP systems. This phenomenon is even more prevalent in social media data during crisis events where meaning and frequency of word usage may change over the course of days. Contextual language models fail to adapt temporally, emphasizing the need for temporal adaptation in models which need to be deployed over an extended period of time. While existing approaches consider data spanning large periods of time (from years to decades), shorter time spans are critical for crisis data. We quantify temporal degradation for this scenario and propose methods to cope with performance loss by leveraging techniques from domain adaptation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort to explore effects of rapid language change driven by adversarial adaptations, particularly during natural and human-induced disasters. Through extensive experimentation on diverse crisis datasets, we analyze under what conditions our approaches outperform strong baselines while highlighting the current limitations of temporal adaptation methods in scenarios where access to unlabeled data is scarce.

Time-critical analysis of social media streams is important for humanitarian organizations to plan rapid response during disasters. The crisis informatics research community has developed several techniques and systems to process and classify big crisis related data posted on social media. However, due to the dispersed nature of the datasets used in the literature, it is not possible to compare the results and measure the progress made towards better models for crisis informatics. In this work, we attempt to bridge this gap by standardizing various existing crisis-related datasets. We consolidate labels of eight annotated data sources and provide 166.1k and 141.5k tweets for informativeness and humanitarian classification tasks, respectively. The consolidation results in a larger dataset that affords the ability to train more sophisticated models. To that end, we provide baseline results using CNN and BERT models.

Social media sources can provide crucial information in crisis situations, but discovering relevant messages is not trivial. Methods have so far focused on universal detection models for all kinds of crises or for certain crisis types (e.g. floods). Event-specific models could implement a more focused search area, but collecting data and training new models for a crisis that is already in progress is costly and may take too much time for a prompt response. As a compromise, manually collecting a small amount of example messages is feasible. Few-shot models can generalize to unseen classes with such a small handful of examples, and do not need be trained anew for each event. We compare how few-shot approaches (matching networks and prototypical networks) perform for this task. Since this is essentially a one-class problem, we also demonstrate how a modified one-class version of prototypical models can be used for this application.