Modeling lithium-ion battery (LIB) degradation offers significant cost savings and enhances the safety and reliability of electric vehicles (EVs) and battery energy storage systems (BESS). Whilst data-driven methods have received great attention for forecasting degradation, they often demonstrate limited generalization ability and tend to underperform particularly in critical scenarios involving accelerated degradation, which are crucial to predict accurately. These methods also fail to elucidate the underlying causes of degradation. Alternatively, physical models provide a deeper understanding, but their complex parameters and inherent uncertainties limit their applicability in real-world settings. To this end, we propose a new model - ACCEPT. Our novel framework uses contrastive learning to map the relationship between the underlying physical degradation parameters and observable operational quantities, combining the benefits of both approaches. Furthermore, due to the similarity of degradation paths between LIBs with the same chemistry, this model transfers non-trivially to most downstream tasks, allowing for zero-shot inference. Additionally, since categorical features can be included in the model, it can generalize to other LIB chemistries. This work establishes a foundational battery degradation model, providing reliable forecasts across a range of battery types and operating conditions.

The surging demand for batteries requires advanced battery management systems, where battery capacity modelling is a key functionality. In this paper, we aim to achieve accurate battery capacity prediction by learning from historical measurements of battery dynamics. We propose GiNet, a gated recurrent units enhanced Informer network, for predicting battery's capacity. The novelty and competitiveness of GiNet lies in its capability of capturing sequential and contextual information from raw battery data and reflecting the battery's complex behaviors with both temporal dynamics and long-term dependencies. We conducted an experimental study based on a publicly available dataset to showcase GiNet's strength of gaining a holistic understanding of battery behavior and predicting battery capacity accurately. GiNet achieves 0.11 mean absolute error for predicting the battery capacity in a sequence of future time slots without knowing the historical battery capacity. It also outperforms the latest algorithms significantly with 27% error reduction on average compared to Informer. The promising results highlight the importance of customized and optimized integration of algorithm and battery knowledge and shed light on other industry applications as well.

Here, we present the outcomes from the second Large Language Model (LLM) Hackathon for Applications in Materials Science and Chemistry, which engaged participants across global hybrid locations, resulting in 34 team submissions. The submissions spanned seven key application areas and demonstrated the diverse utility of LLMs for applications in (1) molecular and material property prediction; (2) molecular and material design; (3) automation and novel interfaces; (4) scientific communication and education; (5) research data management and automation; (6) hypothesis generation and evaluation; and (7) knowledge extraction and reasoning from scientific literature. Each team submission is presented in a summary table with links to the code and as brief papers in the appendix. Beyond team results, we discuss the hackathon event and its hybrid format, which included physical hubs in Toronto, Montreal, San Francisco, Berlin, Lausanne, and Tokyo, alongside a global online hub to enable local and virtual collaboration. Overall, the event highlighted significant improvements in LLM capabilities since the previous year's hackathon, suggesting continued expansion of LLMs for applications in materials science and chemistry research. These outcomes demonstrate the dual utility of LLMs as both multipurpose models for diverse machine learning tasks and platforms for rapid prototyping custom applications in scientific research.

Moving your body is for everyone, regardless of experience level, skill, or location. This year's Best of What's New innovations make getting outside and active easier in many ways. A tightly woven shirt stops itchy mosquito bites sans chemicals. An electric fishing reel cuts the cord and ditches heavy batteries once and for all. An app combines avalanche education with hard-to-find reports for safer snowshoeing and skiing.

We present the design, development, and experimental validation of BlueME, a compact magnetoelectric (ME) antenna array system for underwater robot-to-robot communication. BlueME employs ME antennas operating at their natural mechanical resonance frequency to efficiently transmit and receive very-low-frequency (VLF) electromagnetic signals underwater. We outline the design, simulation, fabrication, and integration of the proposed system on low-power embedded platforms focusing on portable and scalable applications. For performance evaluation, we deployed BlueME on an autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) and a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in open-water field trials. Our tests demonstrate that BlueME maintains reliable signal transmission at distances beyond 200 meters while consuming only 1 watt of power. Field trials show that the system operates effectively in challenging underwater conditions such as turbidity, obstacles, and multipath interference -- that generally affect acoustics and optics. Our analysis also examines the impact of complete submersion on system performance and identifies key deployment considerations. This work represents the first practical underwater deployment of ME antennas outside the laboratory, and implements the largest VLF ME array system to date. BlueME demonstrates significant potential for marine robotics and automation in multi-robot cooperative systems and remote sensor networks.

Scientific user facilities, such as synchrotron beamlines, are equipped with a wide array of hardware and software tools that require a codebase for human-computer-interaction. This often necessitates developers to be involved to establish connection between users/researchers and the complex instrumentation. The advent of generative AI presents an opportunity to bridge this knowledge gap, enabling seamless communication and efficient experimental workflows. Here we present a modular architecture for the Virtual Scientific Companion (VISION) by assembling multiple AI-enabled cognitive blocks that each scaffolds large language models (LLMs) for a specialized task. With VISION, we performed LLM-based operation on the beamline workstation with low latency and demonstrated the first voice-controlled experiment at an X-ray scattering beamline. The modular and scalable architecture allows for easy adaptation to new instrument and capabilities. Development on natural language-based scientific experimentation is a building block for an impending future where a science exocortex -- a synthetic extension to the cognition of scientists -- may radically transform scientific practice and discovery.

We introduce a multi-modal autonomous delivery optimization framework as a coalition game for a fleet of UAVs and ADRs operating in two overlaying networks to address last-mile delivery in urban environments, including high-density areas, road-based routing, and real-world operational challenges. The problem is defined as multiple depot pickup and delivery with time windows constrained over operational restrictions, such as vehicle battery limitation, precedence time window, and building obstruction. Subsequently, the coalition game theory is applied to investigate cooperation structures among the modes to capture how strategic collaboration among vehicles can improve overall routing efficiency. To do so, a generalized reinforcement learning model is designed to evaluate the cost-sharing and allocation to different coalitions for which sub-additive property and non-empty core exist. Our methodology leverages an end-to-end deep multi-agent policy gradient method augmented by a novel spatio-temporal adjacency neighbourhood graph attention network and transformer architecture using a heterogeneous edge-enhanced attention model. Conducting several numerical experiments on last-mile delivery applications, the result from the case study in the city of Mississauga shows that despite the incorporation of an extensive network in the graph for two modes and a complex training structure, the model addresses realistic operational constraints and achieves high-quality solutions compared with the existing transformer-based and heuristics methods and can perform well on non-homogeneous data distribution, generalizes well on the different scale and configuration, and demonstrate a robust performance under stochastic scenarios subject to wind speed and direction.

Estimating the evolution of the battery's State of Charge (SoC) in response to its usage is critical for implementing effective power management policies and for ultimately improving the system's lifetime. Most existing estimation methods are either physics-based digital twins of the battery or data-driven models such as Neural Networks (NNs). In this work, we propose two new contributions in this domain. First, we introduce a novel NN architecture formed by two cascaded branches: one to predict the current SoC based on sensor readings, and one to estimate the SoC at a future time as a function of the load behavior. Second, we integrate battery dynamics equations into the training of our NN, merging the physics-based and data-driven approaches, to improve the models' generalization over variable prediction horizons. We validate our approach on two publicly accessible datasets, showing that our Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) outperform purely data-driven ones while also obtaining superior prediction accuracy with a smaller architecture with respect to the state-of-the-art.

This paper presents a hybrid methodology that enhances the training process of deep learning (DL) models by embedding domain expert knowledge using ontologies and answer set programming (ASP). By integrating these symbolic AI methods, we encode domain-specific constraints, rules, and logical reasoning directly into the model's learning process, thereby improving both performance and trustworthiness. The proposed approach is flexible and applicable to both regression and classification tasks, demonstrating generalizability across various fields such as healthcare, autonomous systems, engineering, and battery manufacturing applications. Unlike other state-of-the-art methods, the strength of our approach lies in its scalability across different domains. The design allows for the automation of the loss function by simply updating the ASP rules, making the system highly scalable and user-friendly. This facilitates seamless adaptation to new domains without significant redesign, offering a practical solution for integrating expert knowledge into DL models in industrial settings such as battery manufacturing.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) perform exceptionally well in generating accurate outputs, their "black box" nature poses significant challenges to transparency and trust. To address this, the paper proposes the TranspNet pipeline, which integrates symbolic AI with LLMs. By leveraging domain expert knowledge, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and formal reasoning frameworks like Answer Set Programming (ASP), TranspNet enhances LLM outputs with structured reasoning and verification.This approach strives to help AI systems deliver results that are as accurate, explainable, and trustworthy as possible, aligning with regulatory expectations for transparency and accountability. TranspNet provides a solution for developing AI systems that are reliable and interpretable, making it suitable for real-world applications where trust is critical.