It's 1am on the west coast of America, but the Emerald Cloud Lab, just south of San Francisco, is still busy. I'm "visiting" via the camera on a chest-high telepresence robot, being driven round the 1,400 sq metre (15,000 sq ft) lab by Emerald's CEO, Brian Frezza, who is also sitting at home. There are no actual scientists anywhere, just a few staff in blue coats quietly following instructions from screens on their trolleys, ensuring the instruments are loaded with reagents and samples. Cloud labs mean anybody, anywhere can conduct experiments by remote control, using nothing more than their web browser. Experiments are programmed through a subscription-based online interface – software then coordinates robots and automated scientific instruments to perform the experiment and process the data.

Deep Learning has received increased attention due to its unbeatable success in many fields, such as computer vision, natural language processing, recommendation systems, and most recently in simulating multiphysics problems and predicting nonlinear dynamical systems. However, modeling and forecasting the dynamics of chaotic systems remains an open research problem since training deep learning models requires big data, which is not always available in many cases. Such deep learners can be trained from additional information obtained from simulated results and by enforcing the physical laws of the chaotic systems. This paper considers extreme events and their dynamics and proposes elegant models based on deep neural networks, called knowledge-based deep learning (KDL). Our proposed KDL can learn the complex patterns governing chaotic systems by jointly training on real and simulated data directly from the dynamics and their differential equations. This knowledge is transferred to model and forecast real-world chaotic events exhibiting extreme behavior. We validate the efficiency of our model by assessing it on three real-world benchmark datasets: El Nino sea surface temperature, San Juan Dengue viral infection, and Bj{\o}rn{\o}ya daily precipitation, all governed by extreme events' dynamics. Using prior knowledge of extreme events and physics-based loss functions to lead the neural network learning, we ensure physically consistent, generalizable, and accurate forecasting, even in a small data regime.

The ocean is experiencing unprecedented rapid change, and visually monitoring marine biota at the spatiotemporal scales needed for responsible stewardship is a formidable task. As baselines are sought by the research community, the volume and rate of this required data collection rapidly outpaces our abilities to process and analyze them. Recent advances in machine learning enables fast, sophisticated analysis of visual data, but have had limited success in the ocean due to lack of data standardization, insufficient formatting, and demand for large, labeled datasets. To address this need, we built FathomNet, an open-source image database that standardizes and aggregates expertly curated labeled data. FathomNet has been seeded with existing iconic and non-iconic imagery of marine animals, underwater equipment, debris, and other concepts, and allows for future contributions from distributed data sources. We demonstrate how FathomNet data can be used to train and deploy models on other institutional video to reduce annotation effort, and enable automated tracking of underwater concepts when integrated with robotic vehicles. As FathomNet continues to grow and incorporate more labeled data from the community, we can accelerate the processing of visual data to achieve a healthy and sustainable global ocean.

Over the last decade, signal processing on graphs has become a very active area of research. Specifically, the number of applications, for instance in statistical or deep learning, using frames built from graphs, such as wavelets on graphs, has increased significantly. We consider in particular the case of signal denoising on graphs via a data-driven wavelet tight frame methodology. This adaptive approach is based on a threshold calibrated using Stein's unbiased risk estimate adapted to a tight-frame representation. We make it scalable to large graphs using Chebyshev-Jackson polynomial approximations, which allow fast computation of the wavelet coefficients, without the need to compute the Laplacian eigendecomposition. However, the overcomplete nature of the tight-frame, transforms a white noise into a correlated one. As a result, the covariance of the transformed noise appears in the divergence term of the SURE, thus requiring the computation and storage of the frame, which leads to an impractical calculation for large graphs. To estimate such covariance, we develop and analyze a Monte-Carlo strategy, based on the fast transformation of zero mean and unit variance random variables. This new data-driven denoising methodology finds a natural application in differential privacy. A comprehensive performance analysis is carried out on graphs of varying size, from real and simulated data.

The construction of spatiotemporal networks using graph convolution networks (GCNs) has become one of the most popular methods for predicting traffic signals. However, when using a GCN for traffic speed prediction, the conventional approach generally assumes the relationship between the sensors as a homogeneous graph and learns an adjacency matrix using the data accumulated by the sensors. However, the spatial correlation between sensors is not specified as one but defined differently from various viewpoints. To this end, we aim to study the heterogeneous characteristics inherent in traffic signal data to learn the hidden relationships between sensors in various ways. Specifically, we designed a method to construct a heterogeneous graph for each module by dividing the spatial relationship between sensors into static and dynamic modules. We propose a network decentralization attention based heterogeneity-aware graph convolution network (HAGCN) method that aggregates the hidden states of adjacent nodes by considering the importance of each channel in a heterogeneous graph. Experimental results on real traffic datasets verified the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving a 6.35% improvement over the existing model and realizing state-of-the-art prediction performance.

Modern Internet of Things (IoT) environments are monitored via a large number of IoT enabled sensing devices, with the data acquisition and processing infrastructure setting restrictions in terms of computational power and energy resources. To alleviate this issue, sensors are often configured to operate at relatively low sampling frequencies, yielding a reduced set of observations. Nevertheless, this can hamper dramatically subsequent decision-making, such as forecasting. To address this problem, in this work we evaluate short-term forecasting in highly underdetermined cases, i.e., the number of sensor streams is much higher than the number of observations. Several statistical, machine learning and neural network-based models are thoroughly examined with respect to the resulting forecasting accuracy on five different real-world datasets. The focus is given on a unified experimental protocol especially designed for short-term prediction of multiple time series at the IoT edge. The proposed framework can be considered as an important step towards establishing a solid forecasting strategy in resource constrained IoT applications.

After plenty of leaks, Ubisoft has confirmed that Assassin's Creed Mirage is the next entry in its long-running series. More details are expected to drop during the Ubisoft Forward event September 10th, but for now we can gleam some tidbits from the announcement image. It shows Basim Ibn Ishaq, a character from the recent Assassin's Creed Valhalla, leaping with his hidden blade in front of the Palace of the Golden Gate in Baghdad (via Polygon). That lines up with previous leaks around the game's setting, which also indicated that Mirage would be a return to stealth gameplay for the series. The new title was originally intended to be DLC for Valhalla, but Bloomberg reports that it was later transformed into a standalone experience to fill out Ubisoft's release schedule. No matter its conception, it's nice to see the series return to its Middle Eastern roots.

Taipei, Taiwan – Taiwan's military has said it shot down an unidentified civilian drone over the outlying island of Kinmen amid a continuing increase in Chinese military activity around the island since last month's controversial visit by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The drone, which was shot down on Thursday, is the first to be hit following a warning from Taiwan that it would use live ammunition against drones. The threat came after a video of Taiwanese soldiers throwing rocks at a Chinese drone went viral. Drone flights have reportedly escalated near Kinmen, which is located a few kilometres off the coast of China, and around the Matsu Islands in the East China Sea. The decision to fire on Chinese drones is a departure for Taiwan's military, said Yen-Chi Hsu, an assistant researcher at Taiwan's Council on Strategic and Wargaming Studies.

Physiological monitoring in intensive care units (ICU) generates data that can be used in clinical research. However, the recording conditions in clinical settings limit the automated extraction of relevant information from physiological signals due to noise and artifacts. Therefore, removing artifacts before clinical research is essential. Manual annotation by experienced researchers, which is the gold standard for removing artifacts, is time-consuming and costly due to the volume of the data generated in the ICU. In this study, we propose a hybrid artifact detection system that combines a Variational Autoencoder with a statistical detection component for the labeling of artifactual samples to automate the costly process of cleaning physiological recordings. The system is applied to minute-by-minute mean blood pressure signals from an intensive care unit dataset. Its performance is verified by manual annotations made by an expert. We benchmark the performance of our system with two other systems that combine an ARIMA or an autoencoder-based model with our statistical detection component. Our results indicate that the system consistently achieves sensitivity and specificity levels of over 90%. Thus, it provides an initial foundation to automate data cleaning in recordings from ICU.

The autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model is a classical, and arguably one of the most studied approaches to model time series data. It has compelling theoretical properties and is widely used among practitioners. More recent deep learning approaches popularize recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and, in particular, long short-term memory (LSTM) cells that have become one of the best performing and most common building blocks in neural time series modeling. While advantageous for time series data or sequences with long-term effects, complex RNN cells are not always a must and can sometimes even be inferior to simpler recurrent approaches. In this work, we introduce the ARMA cell, a simpler, modular, and effective approach for time series modeling in neural networks. This cell can be used in any neural network architecture where recurrent structures are present and naturally handles multivariate time series using vector autoregression. We also introduce the ConvARMA cell as a natural successor for spatially-correlated time series. Our experiments show that the proposed methodology is competitive with popular alternatives in terms of performance while being more robust and compelling due to its simplicity.