Future power systems will rely heavily on micro grids with a high share of decentralised renewable energy sources and energy storage systems. The high complexity and uncertainty in this context might make conventional power dispatch strategies infeasible. Reinforcement-learning based (RL) controllers can address this challenge, however, cannot themselves provide safety guarantees, preventing their deployment in practice. To overcome this limitation, we propose a formally validated RL controller for economic dispatch. We extend conventional constraints by a time-dependent constraint encoding the islanding contingency. The contingency constraint is computed using set-based backwards reachability analysis and actions of the RL agent are verified through a safety layer. Unsafe actions are projected into the safe action space while leveraging constrained zonotope set representations for computational efficiency. The developed approach is demonstrated on a residential use case using real-world measurements.

Wind energy is expected to be one of the leading ways to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement but it in turn heavily depends on effective management of its operations and maintenance (O&M) costs. Blade failures account for one-third of all O&M costs thus making accurate detection of blade damages, especially cracks, very important for sustained operations and cost savings. Traditionally, damage inspection has been a completely manual process thus making it subjective, error-prone, and time-consuming. Hence in this work, we bring more objectivity, scalability, and repeatability in our damage inspection process, using deep learning, to miss fewer cracks. We build a deep learning model trained on a large dataset of blade damages, collected by our drone-based inspection, to correctly detect cracks. Our model is already in production and has processed more than a million damages with a recall of 0.96. We also focus on model interpretability using class activation maps to get a peek into the model workings. The model not only performs as good as human experts but also better in certain tricky cases. Thus, in this work, we aim to increase wind energy adoption by decreasing one of its major hurdles - the O\&M costs resulting from missing blade failures like cracks.

Trustworthy and reliable data delivery is a challenging task in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) due to unique characteristics and constraints. To acquire secured data delivery and address the conflict between security and energy, in this paper we present an evolutionary game based secure clustering protocol with fuzzy trust evaluation and outlier detection for WSNs. Firstly, a fuzzy trust evaluation method is presented to transform the transmission evidences into trust values while effectively alleviating the trust uncertainty. And then, a K-Means based outlier detection scheme is proposed to further analyze plenty of trust values obtained via fuzzy trust evaluation or trust recommendation. It can discover the commonalities and differences among sensor nodes while improving the accuracy of outlier detection. Finally, we present an evolutionary game based secure clustering protocol to achieve a trade-off between security assurance and energy saving for sensor nodes when electing for the cluster heads. A sensor node which failed to be the cluster head can securely choose its own head by isolating the suspicious nodes. Simulation results verify that our secure clustering protocol can effectively defend the network against the attacks from internal selfish or compromised nodes. Correspondingly, the timely data transfer rate can be improved significantly.

The increasing penetration of distributed energy resources in low-voltage networks is turning end-users from consumers to prosumers. However, the incomplete smart meter rollout and paucity of smart meter data due to the regulatory separation between retail and network service provision make active distribution network management difficult. Furthermore, distribution network operators oftentimes do not have access to real-time smart meter data, which creates an additional challenge. For the lack of better solutions, they use blanket rooftop solar export limits, leading to suboptimal outcomes. To address this, we designed a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN)-based model to forecast household solar generation and electricity demand, which serves as an input to chance-constrained optimal power flow used to compute fair operating envelopes under uncertainty.

With the growing complexity of big data workloads that require abundant data and computation, data centers consume a tremendous amount of power daily. In an effort to minimize data center power consumption, several studies developed power models that can be used for job scheduling either reducing the number of active servers or balancing workloads across servers at their peak energy efficiency points. Due to increasing software and hardware heterogeneity, we observed that there is no single power model that works the best for all server conditions. Some complicated machine learning models themselves incur performance and power overheads and hence it is not desirable to use them frequently. There are no power models that consider containerized workload execution. In this paper, we propose a hybrid server power model, Hydra, that considers both prediction accuracy and performance overhead. Hydra dynamically chooses the best power model for the given server conditions. Compared with state-of-the-art solutions, Hydra outperforms across all compute-intensity levels on heterogeneous servers.

Scientists have developed a new machine-learning platform that makes the algorithms that control particle beams and lasers smarter than ever before. Their work could help lead to the development of new and improved particle accelerators that will help scientists unlock the secrets of the subatomic world. Daniele Filippetto and colleagues at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) developed the setup to automatically compensate for real-time changes to accelerator beams and other components, such as magnets. Their machine learning approach is also better than contemporary beam control systems at both understanding why things fail, and then using physics to formulate a response. A paper describing the research was published late last year in Nature Scientific Reports.

However, as we grow older, our bodies become less energy efficient, turning simple daily activities like walking around a block into a daunting effort. Although the effect of aging on the energetic costs of walking is well-documented, we do not yet have a complete understanding of what causes the progressive increase in energetic cost. One of the challenges to understanding this phenomenon is that current technologies for assessing metabolic energy consumption require measuring several minutes of breathing. These measurements are too slow to gain insight into the energetic cost of different phases of the gait cycle. The Disability and Rehabilitation Engineering program (DARE) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) from the National Science Foundation (NSF) are funding a collaborative project at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) and at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) aimed at investigating the metabolic cost of different phases of the walking gait cycle. It is expected that this inter-campus collaboration between researchers from different disciplines will enable the development more creative solutions than single-discipline research.

Renewable resources like sunlight provide a sustainable and carbon neutral mechanism to generate power. Governments in many countries are providing incentives and subsidies to households to install solar panels as part of small-scale renewable energy schemes. This has created a huge demand for solar panels. Reaching out to potential customers at the right time, through the right channel, and with attractive offers is very crucial for solar and energy companies. They're looking for cost-efficient approaches and tools to conduct targeted marketing to proactively reach out to potential customers.

Robotics is the combined effort of science, engineering, and technology that results in devices referred to as robots that mimic or replace human behaviors. Robots have long captivated popular culture, including R2-D2, Prime Optimus, and WALL-E. These exaggerated, humanoid representations of robots typically appear like a parody of the real thing, but may they actually be more futuristic than we think? Robots are developing mechanical and intellectual skills that do not rule out the possibility of an R2-D2-like machine in the future. In the industrial sector, robots are becoming more and more common, and some experts predict that this trend will only continue to grow over time.

One of the key activities as an investor is to read, learn, and synthesize new knowledge all the time. Here are some stuff I read this week in case you share similar interests in AI and deep tech. My teaching colleague David Steier sent me an article on Responsible AI from Microsoft a while back. I then followed up and read the Microsoft's Responsible AI Standards paper. Google's new blog about solving for fluency (organized and intentional linguist expression) in natural language processing AI projects.