Subsequent time your energy stays on throughout a extreme climate occasion, you could have a machine studying mannequin to thank. Researchers on the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab are utilizing synthetic intelligence to resolve energy grid failures. The supervisor of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Jie Chen, and his colleagues have developed a machine studying mannequin that works to investigate knowledge collected from tons of of 1000's of sensors situated throughout the U.S. energy grid. The sensors, parts of what's referred to as synchrophasor expertise, compile huge quantities of real-time knowledge associated to electrical present and voltage in an effort to monitor the well being of the grid and find anomalies that would trigger outages. Synchrophasor evaluation requires intensive computational sources as a result of dimension and real-time nature of the info streams the sensors produce.

Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based control scheme for soft continuum robots. Our dynamic model is based on the Euler-Lagrange approach, but it uses a more accurate description of the robot's inertia and does not include oversimplified assumptions. Based on this model, we introduce an adaptive sliding mode control scheme, which is robust against model parameter uncertainties and unknown input disturbances. We perform a series of experiments with a physical soft continuum arm to evaluate the effectiveness of our controller at tracking task-space trajectory under different payloads. The tracking performance of the controller is around 38\% more accurate than that of a state-of-the-art controller, i.e., the inverse dynamics method. Moreover, the proposed model-based control design is flexible and can be generalized to any continuum robotic arm with an arbitrary number of segments. With this control strategy, soft robotic object manipulation can become more accurate while remaining robust to disturbances.

Cornell engineers have developed a powerful artificial intelligence tool that could help New York state and other governments plan the transition to a carbon-neutral power sector, using a combination of machine learning and optimization modeling to provide hour-by-hour analysis of the empire state's energy needs. States including New York, which has committed to producing 100% clean electricity by 2040, are using technological, environmental and economic data to determine the best policy and investment choices for integrating more renewable energy into the grid. But from a computational perspective, the modeling challenge is enormous, said Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering at Cornell Engineering. "There are design decisions such as how many solar panels or wind turbines to install, and how much energy storage capacity to build," said You, a senior faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, "but even more complex are hourly operating decisions such as how much electricity goes from upstate to downstate, or from a storage center to a neighborhood." You said such high-resolution planning can be achieved using "multi-scale, bottom-up optimization" modeling combined with machine learning.

Identifying a malfunction in the nation's power grid can be like trying to find a needle in an enormous haystack. Hundreds of thousands of interrelated sensors spread across the U.S. capture data on electric current, voltage, and other critical information in real time, often taking multiple recordings per second. Researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab have devised a computationally efficient method that can automatically pinpoint anomalies in those data streams in real time. They demonstrated that their artificial intelligence method, which learns to model the interconnectedness of the power grid, is much better at detecting these glitches than some other popular techniques. Because the machine-learning model they developed does not require annotated data on power grid anomalies for training, it would be easier to apply in real-world situations where high-quality, labeled datasets are often hard to come by.

Next time your power stays on during a severe weather event, you may have a machine learning model to thank. Researchers at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab are using artificial intelligence to solve power grid failures. The manager of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Jie Chen, and his colleagues have developed a machine learning model that works to analyze data collected from hundreds of thousands of sensors located across the U.S. power grid. The sensors, components of what is known as synchrophasor technology, compile vast amounts of real-time data related to electric current and voltage in order to monitor the health of the grid and locate anomalies that could cause outages. Synchrophasor analysis requires intensive computational resources due to the size and real-time nature of the data streams the sensors produce.

Many large enterprises use one form or another of a supply chain application to help manage their supply chains. Supply chain vendors have been touting their investments in artificial intelligence (AI) for the last several years. Alex Pradhan, Product Strategy Leader John Galt Solutions, told me that "all planning vendors have bold marketing around AI." But the trick is to find suppliers with "field-proven AI/ML algorithms" that "have been delivered at scale." Further, while artificial intelligence helps solve certain types of problems, Jay Muelhoefer - the chief marketing officer at Kinaxis pointed out - optimization and heuristics work better for other types of planning problems. This article, which is focused on the different types of artificial intelligence used and the types of problems they are solving, is aimed at helping practitioners cut through the hype.

Despite numerous studies of deep autoencoders (AEs) for unsupervised anomaly detection, AEs still lack a way to express uncertainty in their predictions, crucial for ensuring safe and trustworthy machine learning systems in high-stake applications. Therefore, in this work, the formulation of Bayesian autoencoders (BAEs) is adopted to quantify the total anomaly uncertainty, comprising epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties. To evaluate the quality of uncertainty, we consider the task of classifying anomalies with the additional option of rejecting predictions of high uncertainty. In addition, we use the accuracy-rejection curve and propose the weighted average accuracy as a performance metric. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the BAE and total anomaly uncertainty on a set of benchmark datasets and two real datasets for manufacturing: one for condition monitoring, the other for quality inspection.

Extracting cultivated land accurately from high-resolution remote images is a basic task for precision agriculture. This report introduces our solution to the iFLYTEK challenge 2021 cultivated land extraction from high-resolution remote sensing image. The challenge requires segmenting cultivated land objects in very high-resolution multispectral remote sensing images. We established a highly effective and efficient pipeline to solve this problem. We first divided the original images into small tiles and separately performed instance segmentation on each tile. We explored several instance segmentation algorithms that work well on natural images and developed a set of effective methods that are applicable to remote sensing images. Then we merged the prediction results of all small tiles into seamless, continuous segmentation results through our proposed overlap-tile fusion strategy. We achieved the first place among 486 teams in the challenge.

Occlusions caused by a robot's own body is a common problem for closed-loop control methods employed in eye-to-hand camera setups. We propose an optimization-based reactive controller that minimizes self-occlusions while achieving a desired goal pose. The approach allows coordinated control between the robot's base, arm and head by encoding the line-of-sight visibility to the target as a soft constraint along with other task-related constraints, and solving for feasible joint and base velocities. The generalizability of the approach is demonstrated in simulated and real-world experiments, on robots with fixed or mobile bases, with moving or fixed objects, and multiple objects. The experiments revealed a trade-off between occlusion rates and other task metrics. While a planning-based baseline achieved lower occlusion rates than the proposed controller, it came at the expense of highly inefficient paths and a significant drop in the task success. On the other hand, the proposed controller is shown to improve visibility to the line target object(s) without sacrificing too much from the task success and efficiency. Videos and code can be found at: rhys-newbury.github.io/projects/vmc/.

In five short years, artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) has evolved from a futuristic concept to a standard practice for enterprises that place a high value on getting ahead of the break-fix model of IT support. AIOps proposes a solution for several sources of stress that IT operations (ITOps) face today. IT environments are becoming too complex to operate manually. The breadth of technology ITOps needs to embrace is exponentially increasing. Computing power is moving outside the data center, to the edges of the network and infrastructure problems must be addressed at ever-increasing speeds.