When it comes to building any platform, the hardware is the easiest part and, for many of us, the fun part. But more than anything else, particularly at the beginning of any data processing revolution, it is experience that matters most. Whether to gain it or buy it. With AI being such a hot commodity, many companies that want to figure out how to weave machine learning into their applications are going to have to buy their experience first and cultivate expertise later. This realization is what caused Christopher Ré, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University and a member of its Stanford AI Lab, Kunle Olukotun, a professor of electrical engineer at Stanford, and Rodrigo Liang, a chip designer who worked at Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Oracle, to co-found SambaNova Systems, one of a handful of AI startups trying to sell complete platforms to customers looking to add AI to their application mix. The company has raised an enormous $1.1 billion in four rounds of venture funding since its founding in 2017, and counts Google Ventures, Intel Capital, BlackRock, Walden International, SoftBank, and others as backers as it attempts to commercialize its DataScale platform and, more importantly, its Dataflow subscription service, which rolls it all up and puts a monthly fee on the stack and the expertise to help use it. SambaNova's customers have been pretty quiet, but Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory have installed DataScale platforms and are figuring out how to integrate its AI capabilities into the simulation and modeling applications. Timothy Prickett Morgan: I know we have talked many times before during the rise of the "Niagara" T series of many-threaded Sparc processors, and I had to remind myself of that because I am a dataflow engine, not a storage device, after writing so many stories over more than three decades. I thought it was time to have a chat about what SambaNova is seeing out there in the market, but I didn't immediately make the connection that it was you.

In this paper, we propose a novel benchmark called the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenges+, where agents learn to perform multi-stage tasks and to use environmental factors without precise reward functions. The previous challenges (SMAC) recognized as a standard benchmark of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning are mainly concerned with ensuring that all agents cooperatively eliminate approaching adversaries only through fine manipulation with obvious reward functions. This challenge, on the other hand, is interested in the exploration capability of MARL algorithms to efficiently learn implicit multi-stage tasks and environmental factors as well as micro-control. This study covers both offensive and defensive scenarios. In the offensive scenarios, agents must learn to first find opponents and then eliminate them. The defensive scenarios require agents to use topographic features. For example, agents need to position themselves behind protective structures to make it harder for enemies to attack. We investigate MARL algorithms under SMAC+ and observe that recent approaches work well in similar settings to the previous challenges, but misbehave in offensive scenarios. Additionally, we observe that an enhanced exploration approach has a positive effect on performance but is not able to completely solve all scenarios. This study proposes new directions for future research.

The successful operation of mobile robots requires them to adapt rapidly to environmental changes. To develop an adaptive decision-making tool for mobile robots, we propose a novel algorithm that combines meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) with model predictive control (MPC). Our method employs an off-policy meta-RL algorithm as a baseline to train a policy using transition samples generated by MPC when the robot detects certain events that can be effectively handled by MPC, with its explicit use of robot dynamics. The key idea of our method is to switch between the meta-learned policy and the MPC controller in a randomized and event-triggered fashion to make up for suboptimal MPC actions caused by the limited prediction horizon. During meta-testing, the MPC module is deactivated to significantly reduce computation time in motion control. We further propose an online adaptation scheme that enables the robot to infer and adapt to a new task within a single trajectory. The performance of our method has been demonstrated through simulations using a nonlinear car-like vehicle model with (i) synthetic movements of obstacles, and (ii) real-world pedestrian motion data. The simulation results indicate that our method outperforms other algorithms in terms of learning efficiency and navigation quality.

As it stands, a robust mathematical framework to analyse and study various topics in deep learning is yet to come to the fore. Nonetheless, viewing deep learning as a dynamical system allows the use of established theories to investigate the behaviour of deep neural networks. In order to study the stability of the training process, in this article, we formulate training of deep neural networks as a hydrodynamics system, which has a multisymplectic structure. For that, the deep neural network is modelled using a stochastic differential equation and, thereby, mean-field type control is used to train it. The necessary conditions for optimality of the mean--field type control reduce to a system of Euler-Poincare equations, which has the a similar geometric structure to that of compressible fluids. The mean-field type control is solved numerically using a multisymplectic numerical scheme that takes advantage of the underlying geometry. Moreover, the numerical scheme, yields an approximated solution which is also an exact solution of a hydrodynamics system with a multisymplectic structure and it can be analysed using backward error analysis. Further, nonlinear stability yields the condition for selecting the number of hidden layers and the number of nodes per layer, that makes the training stable while approximating the solution of a residual neural network with a number of hidden layers approaching infinity.

A convolutional autoencoder is trained using a database of airfoil aerodynamic simulations and assessed in terms of overall accuracy and interpretability. The goal is to predict the stall and to investigate the ability of the autoencoder to distinguish between the linear and non-linear response of the airfoil pressure distribution to changes in the angle of attack. After a sensitivity analysis on the learning infrastructure, we investigate the latent space identified by the autoencoder targeting extreme compression rates, i.e. very low-dimensional reconstructions. We also propose a strategy to use the decoder to generate new synthetic airfoil geometries and aerodynamic solutions by interpolation and extrapolation in the latent representation learned by the autoencoder.

In this paper, we introduce a decentralized digital twin (DDT) framework for dynamical systems and discuss the prospects of the DDT modeling paradigm in computational science and engineering applications. The DDT approach is built on a federated learning concept, a branch of machine learning that encourages knowledge sharing without sharing the actual data. This approach enables clients to collaboratively learn an aggregated model while keeping all the training data on each client. We demonstrate the feasibility of the DDT framework with various dynamical systems, which are often considered prototypes for modeling complex transport phenomena in spatiotemporally extended systems. Our results indicate that federated machine learning might be a key enabler for designing highly accurate decentralized digital twins in complex nonlinear spatiotemporal systems.

A central challenge in the computational modeling and simulation of a multitude of science applications is to achieve robust and accurate closures for their coarse-grained representations due to underlying highly nonlinear multiscale interactions. These closure models are common in many nonlinear spatiotemporal systems to account for losses due to reduced order representations, including many transport phenomena in fluids. Previous data-driven closure modeling efforts have mostly focused on supervised learning approaches using high fidelity simulation data. On the other hand, reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful yet relatively uncharted method in spatiotemporally extended systems. In this study, we put forth a modular dynamic closure modeling and discovery framework to stabilize the Galerkin projection based reduced order models that may arise in many nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamical systems with quadratic nonlinearity. However, a key element in creating a robust RL agent is to introduce a feasible reward function, which can be constituted of any difference metrics between the RL model and high fidelity simulation data. First, we introduce a multi-modal RL (MMRL) to discover mode-dependant closure policies that utilize the high fidelity data in rewarding our RL agent. We then formulate a variational multiscale RL (VMRL) approach to discover closure models without requiring access to the high fidelity data in designing the reward function. Specifically, our chief innovation is to leverage variational multiscale formalism to quantify the difference between modal interactions in Galerkin systems. Our results in simulating the viscous Burgers equation indicate that the proposed VMRL method leads to robust and accurate closure parameterizations, and it may potentially be used to discover scale-aware closure models for complex dynamical systems.

Businesses generate GHG emissions both directly through their business activities, and indirectly by the things they use, buy, sell and invest in. The GHG Protocol defined these into three Scopes deftly portrayed in their image below. Scope 1 incorporates emissions from the organisations assets, buildings and fleets. Scope 2 is still reasonably easy to get your head around, encompassing purchased energy. This includes electricity, gas but also other energy like heat or steam.

We've written a policy research paper identifying four strategies that can be used today to improve the likelihood of long-term industry cooperation on safety norms in AI: communicating risks and benefits, technical collaboration, increased transparency, and incentivizing standards. Our analysis shows that industry cooperation on safety will be instrumental in ensuring that AI systems are safe and beneficial, but competitive pressures could lead to a collective action problem, potentially causing AI companies to under-invest in safety. We hope these strategies will encourage greater cooperation on the safe development of AI and lead to better global outcomes of AI. It's important to ensure that it's in the economic interest of companies to build and release AI systems that are safe, secure, and socially beneficial. This is true even if we think AI companies and their employees have an independent desire to do this, since AI systems are more likely to be safe and beneficial if the economic interests of AI companies are not in tension with their desire to build their systems responsibly.

What's the news?: Deep learning is behind machine learning's most high-profile successes. But this incredible performance comes at a cost: training deep-learning models requires huge amounts of energy. Now, new research shows how scientists who use cloud platforms to train algorithms can dramatically reduce the energy they use, and therefore the emissions they create. How can they do it?: Simple changes to cloud settings are the key. Researchers created a tool that measures the electricity usage of any machine-learning program that runs on Azure, Microsoft's cloud service, during every phase of their project.