Solar energy is now the cheapest form of electricity in history. Unfortunately, significantly increasing the grid's fraction of solar energy remains challenging due to its variability, which makes balancing electricity's supply and demand more difficult. While thermal generators' ramp rate -- the maximum rate that they can change their output -- is finite, solar's ramp rate is essentially infinite. Thus, accurate near-term solar forecasting, or nowcasting, is important to provide advance warning to adjust thermal generator output in response to solar variations to ensure a balanced supply and demand. To address the problem, this paper develops a general model for solar nowcasting from abundant and readily available multispectral satellite data using self-supervised learning. Specifically, we develop deep auto-regressive models using convolutional neural networks (CNN) and long short-term memory networks (LSTM) that are globally trained across multiple locations to predict raw future observations of the spatio-temporal data collected by the recently launched GOES-R series of satellites. Our model estimates a location's future solar irradiance based on satellite observations, which we feed to a regression model trained on smaller site-specific solar data to provide near-term solar photovoltaic (PV) forecasts that account for site-specific characteristics. We evaluate our approach for different coverage areas and forecast horizons across 25 solar sites and show that our approach yields errors close to that of a model using ground-truth observations.

The administration of President Joe Biden entered office on January 20, 2021, pledging a broad-strokes overhaul of how Washington interacts with the world, promising to be a distinct counterpoint to the disruptive, go-it-alone posture of former President Donald Trump, and tying stability and prosperity at home to US interests abroad in his so-called "foreign policy for the middle class". As 2021 ends, the administration has indeed sought to re-up relations with key allies and position itself as a central player in combating global crises, but has faced criticism for failing to live up to vows of a human rights-leading foreign policy and for what some have described as an over-emphasis on sweeping ideological differences at a time when global cooperation -- particularly between superpowers -- is sorely needed. "2021 was a year of transition. President Biden replaced Trump's impetuousness with pragmatism and realism. There is a greater understanding of what US policy actually is," PJ Crowley, the former US assistant secretary of state for public affairs under President Barack Obama, told Al Jazeera.

The Cabinet approved a defense budget Friday of ¥5.40 trillion ($47 billion) for fiscal 2022, setting a record high for the eighth consecutive year, to advance the development of new technologies in the face of China's growing military might and the North Korean nuclear threat. The draft budget, including outlays for hosting U.S. military bases, rose 1.1% from the current fiscal year ending in March as Japan ramps up its defense capabilities. The increase for a 10th year in a row is largely attributable to a sharp rise in research and development spending, for which the Defense Ministry has earmarked ¥291.1 billion, up ¥79.6 billion, or 37.6%, from a year earlier. The ministry will invest in advanced technologies, such as crewless planes that use artificial intelligence to fly in teams with next-generation fighter jets. "As the security environment surrounding Japan has been changing at an unprecedented speed and becoming increasingly severe, it is an urgent task for Japan to strengthen its necessary defense capabilities," Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said at a news conference.

The follow-up continues the story of protagonist Aloy across a post-apocalyptic West Coast as she investigates a mysterious plague of red vines that's killing local flora and fauna. Trailers so far have revealed several new features that promise to shake up combat and exploration. Players will be able to navigate (frankly gorgeous) underwater environments, swing around like Spider-Man during battle using the "Pullcaster," a new wrist-mounted grappling hook, and glide down from high places. Several dilapidated versions of real-life landmarks make appearances, like San Francisco's Lombard Street and the Golden Gate Bridge, as do massive new enemy robots like a hulking mammoth and snapping turtle.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has crossed a threshold. "In the past five years, AI has made the leap from something that mostly happens in research labs or other highly controlled settings to something that's out in society affecting people's lives," says Michael Littman, chair of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, hosted at Stanford. It's easy to see what he's talking about: The technology's impact can be seen introducing automation, driving efficiency gains and enhancing productivity, creating new jobs, and reducing risks associated with cyber-threats and fraud. During the pandemic, AI enabled more effective testing for Covid-19 and faster vaccine development, and helped manage grocery supply chains and tailor lessons for individual students affected by remote schooling. As AI expands into more and more facets of our lives, there is also more scrutiny on who's developing it.

The Covid-19 pandemic was devastating for many industries, but it only accelerated the use of artificial intelligence across the U.S. economy. Amid the crisis, companies scrambled to create new services for remote workers and students, beef up online shopping and dining options, make customer call centers more efficient and speed development of important new drugs. Even as applications of machine learning and perception platforms become commonplace, a thick layer of hype and fuzzy jargon clings to AI-enabled software.That makes it tough to identify the most compelling companies in the space--especially those finding new ways to use AI that create value by making humans more efficient, not redundant. With this in mind, Forbes has partnered with venture firms Sequoia Capital and Meritech Capital to create our third annual AI 50, a list of private, promising North American companies that are using artificial intelligence in ways that are fundamental to their operations. To be considered, businesses must be privately-held and utilizing machine learning (where systems learn from data to improve on tasks), natural language processing (which enables programs to "understand" written or spoken language) or computer vision (which relates to how machines "see"). AI companies incubated at, largely funded through or acquired by large tech, manufacturing or industrial firms aren't eligible for consideration. Our list was compiled through a submission process open to any AI company in the U.S. and Canada. The application asked companies to provide details on their technology, business model, customers and financials like funding, valuation and revenue history (companies had the option to submit information confidentially, to encourage greater transparency). Forbes received several hundred entries, of which nearly 400 qualified for consideration. From there, our data partners applied an algorithm to identify 100 companies with the highest quantitative scores--and that also made diversity a priority. Next, a panel of expert AI judges evaluated the finalists to find the 50 most compelling companies (they were precluded from judging companies in which they have a vested interest). Among trends this year are what Sequoia Capital's Konstantine Buhler calls AI workbench companies--building of platforms tailored to different enterprises, including Dataiku, DataRobot Domino Data and Databricks.

AI is being applied to whale research, especially to understand what whales are trying to communicate in the audible sounds they make to each other in the ocean. For example, marine biologist Shane Gero has worked to match clicks coming from whales around the Caribbean island nation of Dominica, to behavior he hopes will reveal the meanings of the sounds they make. Gero is a behavioral ecologist affiliated with the Marine Bioacoustics Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, and the Department of Biology of Dalhousie University of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Gero works with a team from Project CETI, a nonprofit that aims to apply advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of whales. Project CETI has recently announced a five-year effort to build on Gero's work with a research project to try to decipher what sperm whales are saying to each other, according to a recent account in National Geographic.

Our mission is simple--we're changing the way we care for our parents so they can live safely at home as they age. But how we accomplish our mission is anything but simple. Every day, we're solving complex problems that don't come with a playbook. If you're someone who shares our core values--Own the Outcome, Solve with Empathy, and Act with Honor--let's talk. Founded in 2014, Honor is now one of the fastest-growing, non-medical home care companies in the U.S. Why?

Our mission is simple--we're changing the way we care for our parents so they can live safely at home as they age. But how we accomplish our mission is anything but simple. Every day, we're solving complex problems that don't come with a playbook. If you're someone who shares our core values--Own the Outcome, Solve with Empathy, and Act with Honor--let's talk. Founded in 2014, Honor is now one of the fastest-growing, non-medical home care companies in the U.S. Why?

Mike Pondsmith started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. The game, published just a few years before, popularized a newish form of entertainment: tabletop role-playing, in which players, typically using dice and a set of rule books, create characters who pursue open-ended quests within an established world. "The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen," an early D&D review noted. Soon, other such games hit the market, including Traveller, a sci-fi game published in 1977, the year that "Star Wars" came out. Pondsmith, a tall Black man who grew up in multiple countries because his dad was in the Air Force, loved sci-fi, and fancied himself a bit like Lando Calrissian, the smooth-talking "Star Wars" rogue played by Billy Dee Williams.