Google's new superphone goes all out on battery, camera and smarts, leading a new line of Android devices that can run the company's Gemini AI system with a next-generation conversational voice assistant that is a huge leap forward. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. The Pixel 9 Pro XL is the biggest normal phone Google makes, costing from 1,099 ( 1,199/ 1,099/A 1,849) and is joined for the first time this year by a smaller 9 Pro model with the same specs and camera costing 999 ( 1,099/ 999/A 1,699). The XL is therefore for people who want a huge screen and big battery.

Machine learning has driven an exponential increase in computational demand, leading to massive data centers that consume significant amounts of energy and contribute to climate change. This makes sustainable data center control a priority. In this paper, we introduce SustainDC, a set of Python environments for benchmarking multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms for data centers (DC). SustainDC supports custom DC configurations and tasks such as workload scheduling, cooling optimization, and auxiliary battery management, with multiple agents managing these operations while accounting for the effects of each other. We evaluate various MARL algorithms on SustainDC, showing their performance across diverse DC designs, locations, weather conditions, grid carbon intensity, and workload requirements. Our results highlight significant opportunities for improvement of data center operations using MARL algorithms. Given the increasing use of DC due to AI, SustainDC provides a crucial platform for the development and benchmarking of advanced algorithms essential for achieving sustainable computing and addressing other heterogeneous real-world challenges.

Battery life estimation is critical for optimizing battery performance and guaranteeing minimal degradation for better efficiency and reliability of battery-powered systems. The existing methods to predict the Remaining Useful Life(RUL) of Lithium-ion Batteries (LiBs) neglect the relational dependencies of the battery parameters to model the nonlinear degradation trajectories. We present the Battery GraphNets framework that jointly learns to incorporate a discrete dependency graph structure between battery parameters to capture the complex interactions and the graph-learning algorithm to model the intrinsic battery degradation for RUL prognosis. The proposed method outperforms several popular methods by a significant margin on publicly available battery datasets and achieves SOTA performance. We report the ablation studies to support the efficacy of our approach.

In-situ sensing devices need to be deployed in remote environments for long periods of time; minimizing their power consumption is vital for maximising both their operational lifetime and coverage. We introduce Terracorder -- a versatile multi-sensor device -- and showcase its exceptionally low power consumption using an on-device reinforcement learning scheduler. We prototype a unique device setup for biodiversity monitoring and compare its battery life using our scheduler against a number of fixed schedules; the scheduler captures more than 80% of events at less than 50% of the number of activations of the best-performing fixed schedule. We then explore how a collaborative scheduler can maximise the useful operation of a network of devices, improving overall network power consumption and robustness.

What makes the PC the superior platform for personal computing? Sometimes that choice can be daunting though. Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite just launched in Microsoft's debut Copilot_ laptops, coming out swinging against Intel's Core Ultra chip. With the launch of Ryzen AI 300-series today, you're now faced with a third choice. Fear not, as I've just finished testing performance testing of AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, its new flagship processor for Copilot laptops.

To reduce the experimental validation workload for chemical researchers and accelerate the design and optimization of high-energy-density lithium metal batteries, we aim to leverage models to automatically predict Coulombic Efficiency (CE) based on the composition of liquid electrolytes. There are mainly two representative paradigms in existing methods: machine learning and deep learning. However, the former requires intelligent input feature selection and reliable computational methods, leading to error propagation from feature estimation to model prediction, while the latter (e.g. MultiModal-MoLFormer) faces challenges of poor predictive performance and overfitting due to limited diversity in augmented data. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel method COEFF (COlumbic EFficiency prediction via Fine-tuned models), which consists of two stages: pre-training a chemical general model and fine-tuning on downstream domain data. Firstly, we adopt the publicly available MoLFormer model to obtain feature vectors for each solvent and salt in the electrolyte. Then, we perform a weighted average of embeddings for each token across all molecules, with weights determined by the respective electrolyte component ratios. Finally, we input the obtained electrolyte features into a Multi-layer Perceptron or Kolmogorov-Arnold Network to predict CE. Experimental results on a real-world dataset demonstrate that our method achieves SOTA for predicting CE compared to all baselines. Data and code used in this work will be made publicly available after the paper is published.

This paper explores a federated learning approach that automatically selects the number of latent processes in multi-output Gaussian processes (MGPs). The MGP has seen great success as a transfer learning tool when data is generated from multiple sources/units/entities. A common approach in MGPs to transfer knowledge across units involves gathering all data from each unit to a central server and extracting common independent latent processes to express each unit as a linear combination of the shared latent patterns. However, this approach poses key challenges in (i) determining the adequate number of latent processes and (ii) relying on centralized learning which leads to potential privacy risks and significant computational burdens on the central server. To address these issues, we propose a hierarchical model that places spike-and-slab priors on the coefficients of each latent process. These priors help automatically select only needed latent processes by shrinking the coefficients of unnecessary ones to zero. To estimate the model while avoiding the drawbacks of centralized learning, we propose a variational inference-based approach, that formulates model inference as an optimization problem compatible with federated settings. We then design a federated learning algorithm that allows units to jointly select and infer the common latent processes without sharing their data. We also discuss an efficient learning approach for a new unit within our proposed federated framework. Simulation and case studies on Li-ion battery degradation and air temperature data demonstrate the advantageous features of our proposed approach.

Recent studies have increasingly applied natural language processing (NLP) to automatically extract experimental research data from the extensive battery materials literature. Despite the complex process involved in battery manufacturing -- from material synthesis to cell assembly -- there has been no comprehensive study systematically organizing this information. In response, we propose a language modeling-based protocol, Text-to-Battery Recipe (T2BR), for the automatic extraction of end-to-end battery recipes, validated using a case study on batteries containing LiFePO4 cathode material. We report machine learning-based paper filtering models, screening 2,174 relevant papers from the keyword-based search results, and unsupervised topic models to identify 2,876 paragraphs related to cathode synthesis and 2,958 paragraphs related to cell assembly. Then, focusing on the two topics, two deep learning-based named entity recognition models are developed to extract a total of 30 entities -- including precursors, active materials, and synthesis methods -- achieving F1 scores of 88.18% and 94.61%. The accurate extraction of entities enables the systematic generation of 165 end-toend recipes of LiFePO4 batteries. Our protocol and results offer valuable insights into specific trends, such as associations between precursor materials and synthesis methods, or combinations between different precursor materials. We anticipate that our findings will serve as a foundational knowledge base for facilitating battery-recipe information retrieval. The proposed protocol will significantly accelerate the review of battery material literature and catalyze innovations in battery design and development.

Lithium-ion batteries are pivotal to technological advancements in transportation, electronics, and clean energy storage. The optimal operation and safety of these batteries require proper and reliable estimation of battery capacities to monitor the state of health. Current methods for estimating the capacities fail to adequately account for long-term temporal dependencies of key variables (e.g., voltage, current, and temperature) associated with battery aging and degradation. In this study, we explore the usage of transformer networks to enhance the estimation of battery capacity. We develop a transformer-based battery capacity prediction model that accounts for both long-term and short-term patterns in battery data. Further, to tackle the data scarcity issue, data augmentation is used to increase the data size, which helps to improve the performance of the model. Our proposed method is validated with benchmark datasets. Simulation results show the effectiveness of data augmentation and the transformer network in improving the accuracy and robustness of battery capacity prediction.

The growing complexity of power system management has led to an increased interest in reinforcement learning (RL). However, vanilla RL controllers cannot themselves ensure satisfaction of system constraints. Therefore, combining them with formally correct safeguarding mechanisms is an important aspect when studying RL for power system management. Integrating safeguarding into complex use cases requires tool support. To address this need, we introduce the Python tool CommonPower. CommonPower's unique contribution lies in its symbolic modeling approach, which enables flexible, model-based safeguarding of RL controllers. Moreover, CommonPower offers a unified interface for single-agent RL, multi-agent RL, and optimal control, with seamless integration of different forecasting methods. This allows users to validate the effectiveness of safe RL controllers across a large variety of case studies and investigate the influence of specific aspects on overall performance. We demonstrate CommonPower's versatility through a numerical case study that compares RL agents featuring different safeguards with a model predictive controller in the context of building energy management.