Accurate determination of the geothermal gradient is critical for assessing the geothermal energy potential of a given region. Of particular interest is the case of Colombia, a country with abundant geothermal resources. A history of active oil and gas exploration and production has left drilled boreholes in different geological settings, providing direct measurements of the geothermal gradient. Unfortunately, large regions of the country where geothermal resources might exist lack such measurements. Indirect geophysical measurements are costly and difficult to perform at regional scales. Computational thermal models could be constructed, but they require very detailed knowledge of the underlying geology and uniform sampling of subsurface temperatures to be well-constrained. We present an alternative approach that leverages recent advances in supervised machine learning and available direct measurements to predict the geothermal gradient in regions where only global-scale geophysical datasets and course geological knowledge are available. We find that a Gradient Boosted Regression Tree algorithm yields optimal predictions and extensively validate the trained model. We show that predictions of our model are within 12% accuracy and that independent measurements performed by other authors agree well with our model. Finnally, we present a geothermal gradient map for Colombia that highlights regions where futher exploration and data collection should be performed.

Autonomous ocean-exploring vehicles have begun to take advantage of onboard sensor measurements of water properties such as salinity and temperature to locate oceanic features in real time. Such targeted sampling strategies enable more rapid study of ocean environments by actively steering towards areas of high scientific value. Inspired by the ability of aquatic animals to navigate via flow sensing, this work investigates hydrodynamic cues for accomplishing targeted sampling using a palm-sized robotic swimmer. As proof-of-concept analogy for tracking hydrothermal vent plumes in the ocean, the robot is tasked with locating the center of turbulent jet flows in a 13,000-liter water tank using data from onboard pressure sensors. To learn a navigation strategy, we first implemented Reinforcement Learning (RL) on a simulated version of the robot navigating in proximity to turbulent jets. After training, the RL algorithm discovered an effective strategy for locating the jets by following transverse velocity gradients sensed by pressure sensors located on opposite sides of the robot. When implemented on the physical robot, this gradient following strategy enabled the robot to successfully locate the turbulent plumes at more than twice the rate of random searching. Additionally, we found that navigation performance improved as the distance between the pressure sensors increased, which can inform the design of distributed flow sensors in ocean robots. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness and limits of flow-based navigation for autonomously locating hydrodynamic features of interest.

Surrogate-assisted evolutionary algorithms have been widely developed to solve complex and computationally expensive multi-objective optimization problems in recent years. However, when dealing with high-dimensional optimization problems, the performance of these surrogate-assisted multi-objective evolutionary algorithms deteriorate drastically. In this work, a novel Classifier-assisted rank-based learning and Local Model based multi-objective Evolutionary Algorithm (CLMEA) is proposed for high-dimensional expensive multi-objective optimization problems. The proposed algorithm consists of three parts: classifier-assisted rank-based learning, hypervolume-based non-dominated search, and local search in the relatively sparse objective space. Specifically, a probabilistic neural network is built as classifier to divide the offspring into a number of ranks. The offspring in different ranks uses rank-based learning strategy to generate more promising and informative candidates for real function evaluations. Then, radial basis function networks are built as surrogates to approximate the objective functions. After searching non-dominated solutions assisted by the surrogate model, the candidates with higher hypervolume improvement are selected for real evaluations. Subsequently, in order to maintain the diversity of solutions, the most uncertain sample point from the non-dominated solutions measured by the crowding distance is selected as the guided parent to further infill in the uncertain region of the front. The experimental results of benchmark problems and a real-world application on geothermal reservoir heat extraction optimization demonstrate that the proposed algorithm shows superior performance compared with the state-of-the-art surrogate-assisted multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. The source code for this work is available at https://github.com/JellyChen7/CLMEA.

We consider the application of machine learning to the evaluation of geothermal resource potential. A supervised learning problem is defined where maps of 10 geological and geophysical features within the state of Nevada, USA are used to define geothermal potential across a broad region. We have available a relatively small set of positive training sites (known resources or active power plants) and negative training sites (known drill sites with unsuitable geothermal conditions) and use these to constrain and optimize artificial neural networks for this classification task. The main objective is to predict the geothermal resource potential at unknown sites within a large geographic area where the defining features are known. These predictions could be used to target promising areas for further detailed investigations. We describe the evolution of our work from defining a specific neural network architecture to training and optimization trials. Upon analysis we expose the inevitable problems of model variability and resulting prediction uncertainty. Finally, to address these problems we apply the concept of Bayesian neural networks, a heuristic approach to regularization in network training, and make use of the practical interpretation of the formal uncertainty measures they provide.

Visual localization plays an important role in the positioning and navigation of robotics systems within previously visited environments. When visits occur over long periods of time, changes in the environment related to seasons or day-night cycles present a major challenge. Under water, the sources of variability are due to other factors such as water conditions or growth of marine organisms. Yet it remains a major obstacle and a much less studied one, partly due to the lack of data. This paper presents a new deep-sea dataset to benchmark underwater long-term visual localization. The dataset is composed of images from four visits to the same hydrothermal vent edifice over the course of five years. Camera poses and a common geometry of the scene were estimated using navigation data and Structure-from-Motion. This serves as a reference when evaluating visual localization techniques. An analysis of the data provides insights about the major changes observed throughout the years. Furthermore, several well-established visual localization methods are evaluated on the dataset, showing there is still room for improvement in underwater long-term visual localization. The data is made publicly available at https://www.seanoe.org/data/00810/92226/.

Proteins are complex and dynamic molecules, encoded by our genes, that are responsible for many of the varied and fundamental processes of life. They have an astounding range of roles in biology. The rods and cones in our eyes that sense light and make it possible for us to see, the molecular sensors that underlie hearing and our sense of touch, the complex molecular machines that convert sunlight into chemical energy in plants, the motors that drive motion in microbes and our muscles, enzymes that break down plastic, antibodies that protect us from disease, and molecular circuits that cause disease when they fail -- are all proteins. Metagenomics, one of the new frontiers in the natural sciences, uses gene sequencing to discover proteins in samples from environments across the earth, from microbes living in the soil, deep in the ocean, in extreme environments like hydrothermal vents, and even in our guts and on our skin. The natural world contains a vast number of proteins beyond the ones that have been cataloged and annotated in well-studied organisms.

A deep sea blanketed in a thick shell of ice. Yet during a daunting October 2021 mission called the HACON project, a group of over two dozen scientists and engineers used an underwater robot to successfully explore a cryptic ocean world some 13,000 feet beneath the surface of the ice-covered Arctic Ocean. It was the first time researchers surveyed rare volcanic vents -- and the life there -- in the remote Arctic. "It opens a new frontier of exploration in the Arctic," Eva Ramirez-Llodra, a deep sea ecologist for the Norwegian government who co-led the mission, told Mashable. "It's a challenge, but it can be done."

Artificial Intelligence or simply AI is the science of designing intelligent computer programs or machines. AI will change the world as we know it by making everyday tasks easier and more efficient. AI is already created by major developers like IBM but has not nearly reached its full potential. Regardless of the benefits of AI there are many concerns with what the creation of AI can lead to, some as drastic as humanity creating their own uncontrollable superiors to even a third World War. Artificial Intelligence has been an enduring concept since the fifties when Arthur Samuel created the first computer program that taught itself how to play checkers in 1952.

University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA): Developing novel data-driven predictive models for integration into real-time fault detection and diagnosis, and integrate those models by using predictive control algorithms to improve the efficiency of energy production operations in a geothermal power plant. The project will develop deep dynamic neural networks for fault prediction and predictive process control workflows to improve the efficiency of geothermal operations. Upflow Limited (Taupo, New Zealand): Making available multiple decades of closely-guarded production data from one of the world's longest operating geothermal fields, and combining it with the archives from the largest geothermal company operating in the U.S. Models developed from this massive data store will enable the creation of a prediction/recommendation engine that will help operators improve plant availability. Colorado School of Mines (Golden, CO): Applying new machine learning techniques to analyze remote-sensing images, with the goal of developing a process to identify the presence of blind geothermal resources based on surface characteristics. Colorado School of Mines will develop a methodology to automatically label data from hyperspectral images of Brady's Hot Springs, Desert Rock, and the Salton Sea.

We present an approach based on machine learning (ML) to distinguish eruption and precursory signals of Chimay\'{o} geyser (New Mexico, USA) under noisy environments. This geyser can be considered as a natural analog of $\mathrm{CO}_2$ intrusion into shallow water aquifers. By studying this geyser, we can understand upwelling of $\mathrm{CO}_2$-rich fluids from depth, which has relevance to leak monitoring in a $\mathrm{CO}_2$ sequestration project. ML methods such as Random Forests (RF) are known to be robust multi-class classifiers and perform well under unfavorable noisy conditions. However, the extent of the RF method's accuracy is poorly understood for this $\mathrm{CO}_2$-driven geysering application. The current study aims to quantify the performance of RF-classifiers to discern the geyser state. Towards this goal, we first present the data collected from the seismometer that is installed near the Chimay\'{o} geyser. The seismic signals collected at this site contain different types of noises such as daily temperature variations, seasonal trends, animal movement near the geyser, and human activity. First, we filter the signals from these noises by combining the Butterworth-Highpass filter and an Autoregressive method in a multi-level fashion. We show that by combining these filtering techniques, in a hierarchical fashion, leads to reduction in the noise in the seismic data without removing the precursors and eruption event signals. We then use RF on the filtered data to classify the state of geyser into three classes -- remnant noise, precursor, and eruption states. We show that the classification accuracy using RF on the filtered data is greater than 90\%.These aspects make the proposed ML framework attractive for event discrimination and signal enhancement under noisy conditions, with strong potential for application to monitoring leaks in $\mathrm{CO}_2$ sequestration.