To reduce negative environmental impacts, power stations and energy grids need to optimize the resources required for power production. Thus, predicting the energy consumption of clients is becoming an important part of every energy management system. Energy usage information collected by the clients' smart homes can be used to train a deep neural network to predict the future energy demand. Collecting data from a large number of distributed clients for centralized model training is expensive in terms of communication resources. To take advantage of distributed data in edge systems, centralized training can be replaced by federated learning where each client only needs to upload model updates produced by training on its local data. These model updates are aggregated into a single global model by the server. But since different clients can have different attributes, model updates can have diverse weights and as a result, it can take a long time for the aggregated global model to converge. To speed up the convergence process, we can apply clustering to group clients based on their properties and aggregate model updates from the same cluster together to produce a cluster specific global model. In this paper, we propose a recurrent neural network based energy demand predictor, trained with federated learning on clustered clients to take advantage of distributed data and speed up the convergence process.

SAMI researchers are utilizing AI/ML techniques to dramatically accelerate the development of technologies critical to minimizing environmental impacts of fossil fuels while working toward net-zero emissions. Science-based AI/ML modeling injects scientific knowledge and puts humans-in-the-loop by leveraging the data resources with advanced, applied energy models and AI/ML science to derive breakthrough technology innovations. Over recent decades, NETL has produced a suite of science-based computational tools to accelerate technology maturation and confront some of the most difficult energy challenges. These tools span multiple projects across the Lab, including multiphase flow science, materials discovery and qualification, geospatial and subsurface geologic understanding and visualization, and energy system optimization.

Environmental problems become more urgent and affect the lives of people, marine life, and various animal species. Only in 2022, forest fires in Spain, France, and many other countries worldwide led to the destruction of animals' natural habitats, a decrease in the number of air producers, and many harmful outcomes for local residents. Although it is hard to say if humanity can still stop global warming and other environmental issues, there are some ways to restrain their development, and the utilization of renewable energy sources is among them. In this article, we list the best and most innovative renewable energy companies to keep on your radar this year. Moreover, if you are seeking more information on how modern technology can help us prevent global environmental catastrophes, read these AITJ articles: 5 Ways AI Can Improve Environmental Sustainability and How AI Helps Clean Oceans from Plastics.

Butterfly Optimization Algorithm (BOA) is a recent metaheuristic that has been used in several optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a new version of the algorithm (xBOA) based on the crossover operator and compare its results to the original BOA and 3 other variants recently introduced in the literature. We also proposed a framework for solving the unknown area exploration problem with energy constraints using metaheuristics in both single- and multi-robot scenarios. This framework allowed us to benchmark the performances of different metaheuristics for the robotics exploration problem. We conducted several experiments to validate this framework and used it to compare the effectiveness of xBOA with wellknown metaheuristics used in the literature through 5 evaluation criteria. Although BOA and xBOA are not optimal in all these criteria, we found that BOA can be a good alternative to many metaheuristics in terms of the exploration time, while xBOA is more robust to local optima; has better fitness convergence; and achieves better exploration rates than the original BOA and its other variants.

We develop an R package SPQR that implements the semi-parametric quantile regression (SPQR) method in Xu and Reich (2021). The method begins by fitting a flexible density regression model using monotonic splines whose weights are modeled as data-dependent functions using artificial neural networks. Subsequently, estimates of conditional density and quantile process can all be obtained. Unlike many approaches to quantile regression that assume a linear model, SPQR allows for virtually any relationship between the covariates and the response distribution including non-linear effects and different effects on different quantile levels. To increase the interpretability and transparency of SPQR, model-agnostic statistics developed by Apley and Zhu (2020) are used to estimate and visualize the covariate effects and their relative importance on the quantile function. In this article, we detail how this framework is implemented in SPQR and illustrate how this package should be used in practice through simulated and real data examples.

We propose the intermittently tethered unmanned aerial vehicle (iTUAV) as a tradeoff between the power availability of a tethered UAV (TUAV) and the flexibility of an untethered UAV. An iTUAV can provide cellular connectivity while being temporarily tethered to the most adequate ground anchor. Also, it can flexibly detach from one anchor, travel, then attach to another one to maintain/improve the coverage quality for mobile users. Hence, we discuss here the existing UAV-based cellular networking technologies, followed by a detailed description of the iTUAV system, its components, and mode of operation. Subsequently, we present a comparative study of the existing and proposed systems highlighting the differences in key features such as mobility and energy. To emphasize the potential of iTUAV systems, we conduct a case study, evaluate the iTUAV performance, and compare it to benchmarks. Obtained results show that with only 10 anchors in the area, the iTUAV system can serve up to 90% of the users covered by the untethered UAV swapping system. Moreover, results from a small case study prove that the iTUAV allows to balance performance/cost and can be implemented realistically. For instance, when user locations are clustered, with only 2 active iTUAVs and 4 anchors, achieved performance is superior to that of the system with 3 TUAVs, while when considering a single UAV on a 100 minutes event, a system with only 6 anchors outperforms the untethered UAV as it combines location flexibility with increased mission time.

The imminent of quantum computing devices opens up new possibilities for exploiting quantum machine learning (QML) [1, 2, 3] to improve the efficiency of classical machine learning algorithms in many new scientific domains like drug discovery [4] and efficient solar conversion [5]. Although the exploitation of quantum computing devices to carry out QML is still in its early exploratory states, the rapid development in quantum hardware has motivated advances in quantum neural network (QNN) to run in noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices [6, 7, 8, 9, 10], where not enough qubits could be spared for quantum error correction and the imperfect qubits have to be directly employed at the physical layer [11, 12, 13]. Even though, a compromised QNN is proposed by employing a quantum-classical hybrid model that relies on an optimization of the variational quantum circuit (VQC) [14, 15]. The resilience of the VQC to certain types of quantum noise errors and the high flexibility concerning coherence time and gate requirements admit VQC to apply to many promising applications on NISQ devices [16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23]. Although many empirical studies of VQC for quantum machine learning have been reported, its theoretical understanding requires further investigation in terms of representation and generalization powers, particularly when the non-linear operator is employed for dimensionality reduction.

We examine the problem of smoothed online optimization, where a decision maker must sequentially choose points in a normed vector space to minimize the sum of per-round, non-convex hitting costs and the costs of switching decisions between rounds. The decision maker has access to a black-box oracle, such as a machine learning model, that provides untrusted and potentially inaccurate predictions of the optimal decision in each round. The goal of the decision maker is to exploit the predictions if they are accurate, while guaranteeing performance that is not much worse than the hindsight optimal sequence of decisions, even when predictions are inaccurate. We impose the standard assumption that hitting costs are globally $\alpha$-polyhedral. We propose a novel algorithm, Adaptive Online Switching (AOS), and prove that, for a large set of feasible $\delta > 0$, it is $(1+\delta)$-competitive if predictions are perfect, while also maintaining a uniformly bounded competitive ratio of $2^{\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/(\alpha \delta))}$ even when predictions are adversarial. Further, we prove that this trade-off is necessary and nearly optimal in the sense that \emph{any} deterministic algorithm which is $(1+\delta)$-competitive if predictions are perfect must be at least $2^{\tilde{\Omega}(1/(\alpha \delta))}$-competitive when predictions are inaccurate. In fact, we observe a unique threshold-type behavior in this trade-off: if $\delta$ is not in the set of feasible options, then \emph{no} algorithm is simultaneously $(1 + \delta)$-competitive if predictions are perfect and $\zeta$-competitive when predictions are inaccurate for any $\zeta < \infty$. Furthermore, we discuss that memory is crucial in AOS by proving that any algorithm that does not use memory cannot benefit from predictions. We complement our theoretical results by a numerical study on a microgrid application.

Reconstructing force fields (FFs) from atomistic simulation data is a challenge since accurate data can be highly expensive. Here, machine learning (ML) models can help to be data economic as they can be successfully constrained using the underlying symmetry and conservation laws of physics. However, so far, every descriptor newly proposed for an ML model has required a cumbersome and mathematically tedious remodeling. We therefore propose using modern techniques from algorithmic differentiation within the ML modeling process -- effectively enabling the usage of novel descriptors or models fully automatically at an order of magnitude higher computational efficiency. This paradigmatic approach enables not only a versatile usage of novel representations and the efficient computation of larger systems -- all of high value to the FF community -- but also the simple inclusion of further physical knowledge such as higher-order information (e.g. Hessians, more complex partial differential equations constraints etc.), even beyond the presented FF domain.

Many production processes are characterized by numerous and complex cause-and-effect relationships. Since they are only partially known they pose a challenge to effective process control. In this work we present how Structural Equation Models can be used for deriving cause-and-effect relationships from the combination of prior knowledge and process data in the manufacturing domain. Compared to existing applications, we do not assume linear relationships leading to more informative results.