According to a new study in the journal Nature Materials, researchers from Stanford University have harnessed the power of machine learning technology to reverse long-held suppositions about the way lithium-ion batteries charge and discharge, providing engineers with a new list of criteria for making longer-lasting battery cells. This is the first time machine learning has been coupled with knowledge obtained from experiments and physics equations to uncover and describe how lithium-ion batteries degrade over their lifetime. Machine learning accelerates analyses by finding patterns in large amounts of data. In this instance, researchers taught the machine to study the physics of a battery failure mechanism to design superior and safer fast-charging battery packs. Fast charging can be stressful and harmful to lithium-ion batteries, and resolving this problem is vital to the fight against climate change.

Objective: Deep learning-based neural decoders have emerged as the prominent approach to enable dexterous and intuitive control of neuroprosthetic hands. Yet few studies have materialized the use of deep learning in clinical settings due to its high computational requirements. Methods: Recent advancements of edge computing devices bring the potential to alleviate this problem. Here we present the implementation of a neuroprosthetic hand with embedded deep learning-based control. The neural decoder is designed based on the recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture and deployed on the NVIDIA Jetson Nano - a compacted yet powerful edge computing platform for deep learning inference. This enables the implementation of the neuroprosthetic hand as a portable and self-contained unit with real-time control of individual finger movements. Results: The proposed system is evaluated on a transradial amputee using peripheral nerve signals (ENG) with implanted intrafascicular microelectrodes. The experiment results demonstrate the system's capabilities of providing robust, high-accuracy (95-99%) and low-latency (50-120 msec) control of individual finger movements in various laboratory and real-world environments. Conclusion: Modern edge computing platforms enable the effective use of deep learning-based neural decoders for neuroprosthesis control as an autonomous system. Significance: This work helps pioneer the deployment of deep neural networks in clinical applications underlying a new class of wearable biomedical devices with embedded artificial intelligence.

A study carried out jointly by Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) demonstrated the use of machine learning algorithms to understand the lifecycle of lithium-ion batteries. Until now, machine learning in battery technology was limited to identifying patterns in data to speed up scientific analysis. The latest discovery will help researchers in designing and developing longer-lasting batteries. The research team has been working to develop a long-lasting electric vehicle battery that can be charged in 10 minutes. "Battery technology is important for any type of electric powertrain. By understanding the fundamental reactions that occur within the battery we can extend its life, enable faster charging and ultimately design better battery materials. We look forward to building on this work through future experiments to achieve lower-cost, better-performing batteries," said Patrick Herring, a senior scientist of Toyota Research Institute.

GM has released more details about its next-generation Ultium batteries, including plans for lithium-metal (Li-metal) technology to boost performance and energy density. The automaker announced that it has signed an agreement to work with SolidEnergy Systems (SES), an MIT spinoff developing prototype Li-metal batteries with nearly double the capacity of current lithium-ion cells. As a reminder, Li-metal batteries replace carbon anodes with lithium metal, allowing for lighter and more powerful cells. The challenge with the technology is increased resistance and "dendrite" filaments that tend to form on the anodes, making batteries short-circuit and heat up. Previous lithium-metal batteries would only work when heated up to 175 degrees F, but SolidEnergy developed an electrolyte coating for lithium metal foil that works at room temperature.

The biggest energy transition in history is well and truly underway, and nowhere is the shift more readily apparent than in the transport industry. Wall Street is almost unanimous that electric vehicles are the future of the industry, with EV sales already outpacing ICE sales in markets such as Norway. That kind of exponential growth can only mean one thing: Explosive demand for the metals that go into those batteries. Demand for battery metals is projected to soar as the transport industry continues to electrify at a record pace. In fact, there's a real danger that current mining technologies might struggle to keep up with the demand for battery metals in the near future. Thankfully, Artificial intelligence (AI) can not only be deployed to help improve the way these crucial elements are mined but can replace them altogether.

Energy harvesting offers an attractive and promising mechanism to power low-energy devices. However, it alone is insufficient to enable an energy-neutral operation, which can eliminate tedious battery charging and replacement requirements. Achieving an energy-neutral operation is challenging since the uncertainties in harvested energy undermine the quality of service requirements. To address this challenge, we present a rollout-based runtime energy-allocation framework that optimizes the utility of the target device under energy constraints. The proposed framework uses an efficient iterative algorithm to compute initial energy allocations at the beginning of a day. The initial allocations are then corrected at every interval to compensate for the deviations from the expected energy harvesting pattern. We evaluate this framework using solar and motion energy harvesting modalities and American Time Use Survey data from 4772 different users. Compared to state-of-the-art techniques, the proposed framework achieves 34.6% higher utility even under energy-limited scenarios. Moreover, measurements on a wearable device prototype show that the proposed framework has less than 0.1% energy overhead compared to iterative approaches with a negligible loss in utility.

This paper provides a first study of utilizing energy harvesting for sustainable machine learning in distributed networks. We consider a distributed learning setup in which a machine learning model is trained over a large number of devices that can harvest energy from the ambient environment, and develop a practical learning framework with theoretical convergence guarantees. We demonstrate through numerical experiments that the proposed framework can significantly outperform energy-agnostic benchmarks. Our framework is scalable, requires only local estimation of the energy statistics, and can be applied to a wide range of distributed training settings, including machine learning in wireless networks, edge computing, and mobile internet of things.

A group of researchers from Stanford have developed a way to combine processors and memory on multiple hybrid chips to allow AI to run on battery-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets. The team believes that all manner of battery-power electronics would be smarter if they could run AI algorithms. The problem is efforts to build AI-capable chips for mobile devices have run up against something known as the "memory wall." The memory wall is the name for the separation of data processing and memory chips that have to work together to meet the computational demands of AI. Computer scientist Subhasish Mitra says the transactions between processors and memory can consume 95 percent of the energy needed to perform machine learning and AI, severely limiting battery life.

Tesla has given the first look at its new tabless battery cell, dubbed 4680, and Roadrunner production line that, according to CEO Elon Musk, 'will make full-size cars in the same way to cars are made.' The tabless battery was first unveiled in September during the firm's Battery Day, but was only shown by Musk via a PowerPoint presentation. Now, the time has come for Musk to show the world what Tesla has been working on at its pilot battery factory in Fremont, Texas. The one-minute clip shows the white and blue battery moving through different assembly stages with the help of armed and wheeled robots. Tesla also used this opportunity to announce it is taking applications for manufacturing jobs at its planned battery facilities in Berlin and Texas.

Machine learning has been widely adopted to accelerate the screening of materials. Most existing studies implicitly assume that the training data are generated through a deterministic, unbiased process, but this assumption might not hold for the simulation of some complex materials. In this work, we aim to screen amorphous polymer electrolytes which are promising candidates for the next generation lithium-ion battery technology but extremely expensive to simulate due to their structural complexity. We demonstrate that a multi-task graph neural network can learn from a large amount of noisy, biased data and a small number of unbiased data and reduce both random and systematic errors in predicting the transport properties of polymer electrolytes. This observation allows us to achieve accurate predictions on the properties of complex materials by learning to reduce errors in the training data, instead of running repetitive, expensive simulations which is conventionally used to reduce simulation errors. With this approach, we screen a space of 6247 polymer electrolytes, orders of magnitude larger than previous computational studies. We also find a good extrapolation performance to the top polymers from a larger space of 53362 polymers and 31 experimentally-realized polymers. The strategy employed in this work may be applicable to a broad class of material discovery problems that involve the simulation of complex, amorphous materials.