Energy
The 209 Best Prime Day Deals, Tested and Tracked By Our Team
WIRED's coverage of the best Amazon Prime Day deals is, as they say, built different. For starters, we only include products someone from our team has personally tested and reviewed. That means you will not find any flimsy fad gadgets or shoddy dupes among our recommendations. What remains is all solid stuff. You'll often find a link to a longer write-up to a review or buying guide if you want to make a fully informed buying decision. Additionally, we obsessively track prices to make sure everything on the list is a genuinely good price right now. For more on that, consult our helpful guide to shopping like a pro on Prime Day. We test products year-round and handpicked these Prime Day deals. Products that are sold out or no longer discounted will be crossed out. We'll update this guide regularly throughout Prime Day by adding fresh deals and removing dead deals. Logitech makes a lot of great, functional keyboards, but the Pop Keys (9/10, WIRED Recommends) not only leverage the ...
Accelerating Simulation of Two-Phase Flows with Neural PDE Surrogates
Poels, Yoeri, Minartz, Koen, Bansal, Harshit, Menkovski, Vlado
Simulation is a powerful tool to better understand physical systems, but generally requires computationally expensive numerical methods. Downstream applications of such simulations can become computationally infeasible if they require many forward solves, for example in the case of inverse design with many degrees of freedom. In this work, we investigate and extend neural PDE solvers as a tool to aid in scaling simulations for two-phase flow problems, and simulations of oil expulsion from a pore specifically. We extend existing numerical methods for this problem to a more complex setting involving varying geometries of the domain to generate a challenging dataset. Further, we investigate three prominent neural PDE solver methods, namely the UNet, DRN, and U-FNO, and extend them for characteristics of the oil-expulsion problem: (1) spatial conditioning on the geometry; (2) periodicity in the boundary; (3) approximate mass conservation. We scale all methods and benchmark their speed-accuracy trade-off, evaluate qualitative properties, and perform an ablation study. We find that the investigated methods can accurately model the droplet dynamics with up to three orders of magnitude speed-up, that our extensions improve performance over the baselines, and that the introduced varying geometries constitute a significantly more challenging setting over the previously considered oil expulsion problem.
AIGC for Industrial Time Series: From Deep Generative Models to Large Generative Models
Ren, Lei, Wang, Haiteng, Tang, Yang, Yang, Chunhua
With the remarkable success of generative models like ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) is undergoing explosive development. Not limited to text and images, generative models can generate industrial time series data, addressing challenges such as the difficulty of data collection and data annotation. Due to their outstanding generation ability, they have been widely used in Internet of Things, metaverse, and cyber-physical-social systems to enhance the efficiency of industrial production. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of generative models for industrial time series from deep generative models (DGMs) to large generative models (LGMs). First, a DGM-based AIGC framework is proposed for industrial time series generation. Within this framework, we survey advanced industrial DGMs and present a multi-perspective categorization. Furthermore, we systematically analyze the critical technologies required to construct industrial LGMs from four aspects: large-scale industrial dataset, LGMs architecture for complex industrial characteristics, self-supervised training for industrial time series, and fine-tuning of industrial downstream tasks. Finally, we conclude the challenges and future directions to enable the development of generative models in industry.
Human-Machine Shared Control Approach for the Takeover of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control
Wang, Haoran, Li, Zhenning, Eichberger, Arno, Hu, Jia
Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) often requires human takeover for tasks such as exiting a freeway. Direct human takeover can pose significant risks, especially given the close-following strategy employed by CACC, which might cause drivers to feel unsafe and execute hard braking, potentially leading to collisions. This research aims to develop a CACC takeover controller that ensures a smooth transition from automated to human control. The proposed CACC takeover maneuver employs an indirect human-machine shared control approach, modeled as a Stackelberg competition where the machine acts as the leader and the human as the follower. The machine guides the human to respond in a manner that aligns with the machine's expectations, aiding in maintaining following stability. Additionally, the human reaction function is integrated into the machine's predictive control system, moving beyond a simple "prediction-planning" pipeline to enhance planning optimality. The controller has been verified to i) enable a smooth takeover maneuver of CACC; ii) ensure string stability within a specific Operational Design Domain (ODD) when human control authority is below 32.7%; iii) enhance both perceived and actual safety through machine interventions; and iv) reduce the impact on upstream traffic by up to 60%.
NITRO-D: Native Integer-only Training of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks
Pirillo, Alberto, Colombo, Luca, Roveri, Manuel
Quantization has become increasingly pivotal in addressing the steadily increasing computational and memory requirements of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). By reducing the number of bits used to represent weights and activations (typically from 32-bit floating-point to 16-bit or 8-bit integers), quantization reduces the memory footprint, energy consumption, and execution time of DNN models. However, traditional quantization methods typically focus on the inference of DNNs, while the training process still relies on floating-point operations. To date, only one work in the literature has addressed integer-only training for Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) architectures. This work introduces NITRO-D, a new framework for training arbitrarily deep integer-only Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) that operate entirely< in the integer-only domain for both training and inference. NITRO-D is the first framework in the literature enabling the training of integer-only CNNs without the need to introduce a quantization scheme. Specifically, NITRO-D introduces a novel architecture integrating multiple integer local-loss blocks, which include the proposed NITRO Scaling Layer and the NITRO-ReLU activation function. Additionally, it introduces a novel integer-only learning algorithm derived from Local Error Signals (LES), utilizing IntegerSGD, an optimizer specifically designed to operate in an integer-only context. NITRO-D is implemented in an open-source Python library. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate its effectiveness across several state-of-the-art image recognition datasets. Results show significant performance improvements from 2.47% to 5.96% for integer-only MLP architectures over the state-of-the-art solution, and the capability of training integer-only CNN architectures with minimal accuracy degradation from -0.15% to -4.22% compared to floating-point LES.
Generating Multi-Modal and Multi-Attribute Single-Cell Counts with CFGen
Palma, Alessandro, Richter, Till, Zhang, Hanyi, Lubetzki, Manuel, Tong, Alexander, Dittadi, Andrea, Theis, Fabian
Generative modeling of single-cell RNA-seq data has shown invaluable potential in community-driven tasks such as trajectory inference, batch effect removal and gene expression generation. However, most recent deep models generating synthetic single cells from noise operate on pre-processed continuous gene expression approximations, ignoring the inherently discrete and over-dispersed nature of single-cell data, which limits downstream applications and hinders the incorporation of robust noise models. Moreover, crucial aspects of deep-learning-based synthetic single-cell generation remain underexplored, such as controllable multi-modal and multi-label generation and its role in the performance enhancement of downstream tasks. This work presents Cell Flow for Generation (CFGen), a flow-based conditional generative model for multi-modal single-cell counts, which explicitly accounts for the discrete nature of the data. Our results suggest improved recovery of crucial biological data characteristics while accounting for novel generative tasks such as conditioning on multiple attributes and boosting rare cell type classification via data augmentation. By showcasing CFGen on a diverse set of biological datasets and settings, we provide evidence of its value to the fields of computational biology and deep generative models.
COKE: Causal Discovery with Chronological Order and Expert Knowledge in High Proportion of Missing Manufacturing Data
Ou, Ting-Yun, Chang, Ching, Peng, Wen-Chih
Understanding causal relationships between machines is crucial for fault diagnosis and optimization in manufacturing processes. Real-world datasets frequently exhibit up to 90% missing data and high dimensionality from hundreds of sensors. These datasets also include domain-specific expert knowledge and chronological order information, reflecting the recording order across different machines, which is pivotal for discerning causal relationships within the manufacturing data. However, previous methods for handling missing data in scenarios akin to real-world conditions have not been able to effectively utilize expert knowledge. Conversely, prior methods that can incorporate expert knowledge struggle with datasets that exhibit missing values. Therefore, we propose COKE to construct causal graphs in manufacturing datasets by leveraging expert knowledge and chronological order among sensors without imputing missing data. Utilizing the characteristics of the recipe, we maximize the use of samples with missing values, derive embeddings from intersections with an initial graph that incorporates expert knowledge and chronological order, and create a sensor ordering graph. The graph-generating process has been optimized by an actor-critic architecture to obtain a final graph that has a maximum reward. Experimental evaluations in diverse settings of sensor quantities and missing proportions demonstrate that our approach compared with the benchmark methods shows an average improvement of 39.9% in the F1-score. Moreover, the F1-score improvement can reach 62.6% when considering the configuration similar to real-world datasets, and 85.0% in real-world semiconductor datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/OuTingYun/COKE.
Voltage-Controlled Magnetoelectric Devices for Neuromorphic Diffusion Process
Cheng, Yang, Shu, Qingyuan, Lee, Albert, He, Haoran, Zhu, Ivy, Suhail, Haris, Chen, Minzhang, Chen, Renhe, Wang, Zirui, Zhang, Hantao, Wang, Chih-Yao, Yang, Shan-Yi, Hsin, Yu-Chen, Shih, Cheng-Yi, Lee, Hsin-Han, Cheng, Ran, Pamarti, Sudhakar, Kou, Xufeng, Wang, Kang L.
Stochastic diffusion processes are pervasive in nature, from the seemingly erratic Brownian motion to the complex interactions of synaptically-coupled spiking neurons. Recently, drawing inspiration from Langevin dynamics, neuromorphic diffusion models were proposed and have become one of the major breakthroughs in the field of generative artificial intelligence. Unlike discriminative models that have been well developed to tackle classification or regression tasks, diffusion models as well as other generative models such as ChatGPT aim at creating content based upon contexts learned. However, the more complex algorithms of these models result in high computational costs using today's technologies, creating a bottleneck in their efficiency, and impeding further development. Here, we develop a spintronic voltage-controlled magnetoelectric memory hardware for the neuromorphic diffusion process. The in-memory computing capability of our spintronic devices goes beyond current Von Neumann architecture, where memory and computing units are separated. Together with the non-volatility of magnetic memory, we can achieve high-speed and low-cost computing, which is desirable for the increasing scale of generative models in the current era. We experimentally demonstrate that the hardware-based true random diffusion process can be implemented for image generation and achieve comparable image quality to software-based training as measured by the Frechet inception distance (FID) score, achieving ~10^3 better energy-per-bit-per-area over traditional hardware.
Multi evolutional deep neural networks (Multi-EDNN)
Evolutional deep neural networks (EDNN) solve partial differential equations (PDEs) by marching the network representation of the solution fields, using the governing equations. Use of a single network to solve coupled PDEs on large domains requires a large number of network parameters and incurs a significant computational cost. We introduce coupled EDNN (C-EDNN) to solve systems of PDEs by using independent networks for each state variable, which are only coupled through the governing equations. We also introduce distributed EDNN (D-EDNN) by spatially partitioning the global domain into several elements and assigning individual EDNNs to each element to solve the local evolution of the PDE. The networks then exchange the solution and fluxes at their interfaces, similar to flux-reconstruction methods, and ensure that the PDE dynamics are accurately preserved between neighboring elements. Together C-EDNN and D-EDNN form the general class of Multi-EDNN methods. We demonstrate these methods with aid of canonical problems including linear advection, the heat equation, and the compressible Navier-Stokes equations in Couette and Taylor-Green flows.
Spike Talk: Genesis and Neural Coding Scheme Translations
Although digitalization of future power grids offer several coordination incentives, the reliability and security of information and communication technologies (ICT) hinders its overall performance. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture Spike Talk via a unified representation of power and information as a means of data normalization using spikes for coordinated control of microgrids. This grid-edge technology allows each distributed energy resource (DER) to execute decentralized secondary control philosophy independently by interacting among each other using power flow along the tie-lines. Inspired from the field of computational neuroscience, Spike Talk basically builds on a fine-grained parallelism on the information transfer theory in our brains, particularly when neurons (modeled as DERs) transmit information (inferred from power streams measurable at each DER) through synapses (modeled as tie-lines). Not only does Spike Talk simplify and address the current bottlenecks of the cyber-physical architectural operation by dismissing the ICT layer, it provides intrinsic operational and cost-effective opportunities in terms of infrastructure development, computations and modeling. Hence, this paper provides a pedagogic illustration of the key concepts and design theories. Since we focus on coordinated control of microgrids in this paper, the signaling accuracy and system performance is studied for several neural coding schemes responsible for converting the real-valued local measurements into spikes.