Technology Engineering Need to melt ice? A new molecular trick could transform deicing. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. As winter approaches, large swaths of the United States are eagerly awaiting their first big snowfalls of the season. As the snowflakes fall, many will dig out old, rusted sleds, toil over shaping the perfect snowball, and relish an evening brought back to life by a warm cup of hot cocoa .

Janta Power secures $5.5 million in seed funding to expand vertical solar towers that produce 50% more energy than traditional flat panels while using one-third the land.

To help address these issues, a natural approach is to consider games with special structures. In this paper, we focus on congestion games.

Recent advances in deep forecasting models have achieved remarkable performance, yet most approaches still struggle to provide both accurate predictions and interpretable insights into temporal dynamics. This paper proposes CaReTS, a novel multi-task learning framework that combines classification and regression tasks for multi-step time series forecasting problems. The framework adopts a dual-stream architecture, where a classification branch learns the stepwise trend into the future, while a regression branch estimates the corresponding deviations from the latest observation of the target variable. The dual-stream design provides more interpretable predictions by disentangling macro-level trends from micro-level deviations in the target variable. To enable effective learning in output prediction, deviation estimation, and trend classification, we design a multi-task loss with uncertainty-aware weighting to adaptively balance the contribution of each task. Furthermore, four variants (CaReTS1--4) are instantiated under this framework to incorporate mainstream temporal modelling encoders, including convolutional neural networks (CNNs), long short-term memory networks (LSTMs), and Transformers. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that CaReTS outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms in forecasting accuracy, while achieving higher trend classification performance.

In regions like Punjab, India, where groundwater levels are plummeting at 41.6 cm/year, adopting water-saving rice farming practices is critical. Direct-Seeded Rice (DSR) and Alternate Wetting and Drying (A WD) can cut irrigation water use by 20-40% without hurting yields, yet lack of spatial data on adoption impedes effective adaptation policy and climate action. We present a machine learning framework to bridge this data gap by monitoring sustainable rice farming at scale. In collaboration with agronomy experts and a large-scale farmer training program, we obtained ground-truth data from 1,400 fields across Punjab. Leveraging this partnership, we developed a novel dimensional classification approach that decouples sowing and irrigation practices, achieving F1 scores of 0.8 and 0.74 respectively, solely employing Sentinel-1 satellite imagery. Explainability analysis reveals that DSR classification is robust while A WD classification depends primarily on planting schedule differences, as Sentinel-1's 12-day revisit frequency cannot capture the higher frequency irrigation cycles characteristic of A WD practices. Applying this model across 3 million fields reveals spatial heterogeneity in adoption at the state level, highlighting gaps and opportunities for policy targeting. Our district-level adoption rates correlate well with government estimates (Spearman's ρ=0.69 and Rank Biased Overlap=0.77). This study provides policymakers and sustainability programs a powerful tool to track practice adoption, inform targeted interventions, and drive data-driven policies for water conservation and climate mitigation at regional scale.

The rapid growth of edge devices has driven the demand for deploying artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge, giving rise to Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) and its evolving counterpart, Tiny Deep Learning (TinyDL). While TinyML initially focused on enabling simple inference tasks on microcontrollers, the emergence of TinyDL marks a paradigm shift toward deploying deep learning models on severely resource-constrained hardware. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of the transition from TinyML to TinyDL, encompassing architectural innovations, hardware platforms, model optimization techniques, and software toolchains. We analyze state-of-the-art methods in quantization, pruning, and neural architecture search (NAS), and examine hardware trends from MCUs to dedicated neural accelerators. Furthermore, we categorize software deployment frameworks, compilers, and AutoML tools enabling practical on-device learning. Applications across domains such as computer vision, audio recognition, healthcare, and industrial monitoring are reviewed to illustrate the real-world impact of TinyDL. Finally, we identify emerging directions including neuromorphic computing, federated TinyDL, edge-native foundation models, and domain-specific co-design approaches. This survey aims to serve as a foundational resource for researchers and practitioners, offering a holistic view of the ecosystem and laying the groundwork for future advancements in edge AI.

Cooperative autonomous robotic systems have significant potential for executing complex multi-task missions across space, air, ground, and maritime domains. But they commonly operate in remote, dynamic and hazardous environments, requiring rapid in-mission adaptation without reliance on fragile or slow communication links to centralised compute. Fast, on-board replanning algorithms are therefore needed to enhance resilience. Reinforcement Learning shows strong promise for efficiently solving mission planning tasks when formulated as Travelling Salesperson Problems (TSPs), but existing methods: 1) are unsuitable for replanning, where agents do not start at a single location; 2) do not allow cooperation between agents; 3) are unable to model tasks with variable durations; or 4) lack practical considerations for on-board deployment. Here we define the Cooperative Mission Replanning Problem as a novel variant of multiple TSP with adaptations to overcome these issues, and develop a new encoder/decoder-based model using Graph Attention Networks and Attention Models to solve it effectively and efficiently. Using a simple example of cooperative drones, we show our replanner consistently (90% of the time) maintains performance within 10% of the state-of-the-art LKH3 heuristic solver, whilst running 85-370 times faster on a Raspberry Pi. This work paves the way for increased resilience in autonomous multi-agent systems.

Effective robotic autonomy in unknown environments demands proactive exploration and precise understanding of both geometry and semantics. In this paper, we propose ActiveSGM, an active semantic mapping framework designed to predict the informativeness of potential observations before execution. Built upon a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) mapping backbone, our approach employs semantic and geometric uncertainty quantification, coupled with a sparse semantic representation, to guide exploration. By enabling robots to strategically select the most beneficial viewpoints, ActiveSGM efficiently enhances mapping completeness, accuracy, and robustness to noisy semantic data, ultimately supporting more adaptive scene exploration. Our experiments on the Replica and Matterport3D datasets highlight the effectiveness of ActiveSGM in active semantic mapping tasks.

A key element to support the increased amounts of renewable energy in the energy system is flexibility, i.e., the possibility of changing energy loads in time and amount. Many flexibility models have been designed; however, exact models fail to scale for long time horizons or many devices. Because of this, the FlexOffers model has been designed, to provide device-independent approximations of flexibility with good accuracy, and much better scaling for long time horizons and many devices. An important aspect of the real-life implementation of energy flexibility is enabling flexible data exchange with many smart energy appliances and market systems, e.g., in smart buildings. For this, ontologies standardizing data formats are required. However, the current industry standard ontology for integrating smart devices for energy purposes, SAREF for Energy Flexibility (SAREF4ENER), only has limited support for flexibility and thus cannot support important use cases. In this paper, we propose an extension of SAREF4ENER that integrates full support for the complete FlexOffer model, including advanced use cases, while maintaining backward compatibility. This novel ontology module can accurately describe flexibility for advanced devices such as electric vehicles, batteries, and heat pumps. It can also capture the inherent uncertainty associated with many flexible load types.

Safe planning of an autonomous agent in interactive environments -- such as the control of a self-driving vehicle among pedestrians and human-controlled vehicles -- poses a major challenge as the behavior of the environment is unknown and reactive to the behavior of the autonomous agent. This coupling gives rise to interaction-driven distribution shifts where the autonomous agent's control policy may change the environment's behavior, thereby invalidating safety guarantees in existing work. Indeed, recent works have used conformal prediction (CP) to generate distribution-free safety guarantees using observed data of the environment. However, CP's assumption on data exchangeability is violated in interactive settings due to a circular dependency where a control policy update changes the environment's behavior, and vice versa. To address this gap, we propose an iterative framework that robustly maintains safety guarantees across policy updates by quantifying the potential impact of a planned policy update on the environment's behavior. We realize this via adversarially robust CP where we perform a regular CP step in each episode using observed data under the current policy, but then transfer safety guarantees across policy updates by analytically adjusting the CP result to account for distribution shifts. This adjustment is performed based on a policy-to-trajectory sensitivity analysis, resulting in a safe, episodic open-loop planner. We further conduct a contraction analysis of the system providing conditions under which both the CP results and the policy updates are guaranteed to converge. We empirically demonstrate these safety and convergence guarantees on a two-dimensional car-pedestrian case study. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first results that provide valid safety guarantees in such interactive settings.