Energy
How artificial intelligence can be used to identify solar panel defects
One of the biggest challenges for non-AI experts is the terminology. Artificial intelligence, machine learning (ML), and computer vision (CV) are frequently discussed, but people outside of data science fields often do not know what they mean. Fortunately, it is not that complex: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Computer Vision all generally refer to the same thing, just with more specificity. For example, if you are running a computer vision algorithm to identify solar panel defects, you are engaging in AI, ML, and CV. In contrast, if you are translating words from English to Spanish using an algorithm, that is more likely to be AI or ML, not CV. Most AI inspection projects in the solar panel industry are typically CV initiatives.
A Deep Learning approach to Reduced Order Modelling of Parameter Dependent Partial Differential Equations
Franco, Nicola R., Manzoni, Andrea, Zunino, Paolo
Within the framework of parameter dependent PDEs, we develop a constructive approach based on Deep Neural Networks for the efficient approximation of the parameter-to-solution map. The research is motivated by the limitations and drawbacks of state-of-the-art algorithms, such as the Reduced Basis method, when addressing problems that show a slow decay in the Kolmogorov n-width. Our work is based on the use of deep autoencoders, which we employ for encoding and decoding a high fidelity approximation of the solution manifold. To provide guidelines for the design of deep autoencoders, we consider a nonlinear version of the Kolmogorov n-width over which we base the concept of a minimal latent dimension. We show that the latter is intimately related to the topological properties of the solution manifold, and we provide theoretical results with particular emphasis on second order elliptic PDEs, characterizing the minimal dimension and the approximation errors of the proposed approach. The theory presented is further supported by numerical experiments, where we compare the proposed approach with classical POD-Galerkin reduced order models. In particular, we consider parametrized advection-diffusion PDEs, and we test the methodology in the presence of strong transport fields, singular terms and stochastic coefficients. Introduction In many areas of science, such as physics, biology and engineering, phenomena are modeled in terms of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) that exhibit dependence on one or multiple parameters.
An AI-based Domain-Decomposition Non-Intrusive Reduced-Order Model for Extended Domains applied to Multiphase Flow in Pipes
Heaney, Claire E., Wolffs, Zef, Tómasson, Jón Atli, Kahouadji, Lyes, Salinas, Pablo, Nicolle, André, Matar, Omar K., Navon, Ionel M., Srinil, Narakorn, Pain, Christopher C.
The modelling of multiphase flow in a pipe presents a significant challenge for high-resolution computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models due to the high aspect ratio (length over diameter) of the domain. In subsea applications, the pipe length can be several hundreds of kilometres versus a pipe diameter of just a few inches. In this paper, we present a new AI-based non-intrusive reduced-order model within a domain decomposition framework (AI-DDNIROM) which is capable of making predictions for domains significantly larger than the domain used in training. This is achieved by using domain decomposition; dimensionality reduction; training a neural network to make predictions for a single subdomain; and by using an iteration-by-subdomain technique to converge the solution over the whole domain. To find the low-dimensional space, we explore several types of autoencoder networks, known for their ability to compress information accurately and compactly. The performance of the autoencoders is assessed on two advection-dominated problems: flow past a cylinder and slug flow in a pipe. To make predictions in time, we exploit an adversarial network which aims to learn the distribution of the training data, in addition to learning the mapping between particular inputs and outputs. This type of network has shown the potential to produce realistic outputs. The whole framework is applied to multiphase slug flow in a horizontal pipe for which an AI-DDNIROM is trained on high-fidelity CFD simulations of a pipe of length 10 m with an aspect ratio of 13:1, and tested by simulating the flow for a pipe of length 98 m with an aspect ratio of almost 130:1. Statistics of the flows obtained from the CFD simulations are compared to those of the AI-DDNIROM predictions to demonstrate the success of our approach.
Online V2X Scheduling for Raw-Level Cooperative Perception
Jia, Yukuan, Mao, Ruiqing, Sun, Yuxuan, Zhou, Sheng, Niu, Zhisheng
Cooperative perception of connected vehicles comes to the rescue when the field of view restricts stand-alone intelligence. While raw-level cooperative perception preserves most information to guarantee accuracy, it is demanding in communication bandwidth and computation power. Therefore, it is important to schedule the most beneficial vehicle to share its sensor in terms of supplementary view and stable network connection. In this paper, we present a model of raw-level cooperative perception and formulate the energy minimization problem of sensor sharing scheduling as a variant of the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem. Specifically, volatility of the neighboring vehicles, heterogeneity of V2X channels, and the time-varying traffic context are taken into consideration. Then we propose an online learning-based algorithm with logarithmic performance loss, achieving a decent trade-off between exploration and exploitation. Simulation results under different scenarios indicate that the proposed algorithm quickly learns to schedule the optimal cooperative vehicle and saves more energy as compared to baseline algorithms.
OpenAI Chief Scientist Says Advanced AI May Already Be Conscious
OpenAI's top researcher has made a startling claim this week: that artificial intelligence may already be gaining consciousness. Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist of the OpenAI research group, tweeted today that "it may be that today's large neural networks are slightly conscious." Needless to say, that's an unusual point of view. The widely accepted idea among AI researchers is that the tech has made great strides over the past decade, but still falls far short of human intelligence, nevermind being anywhere close to experiencing the world consciously. It's possible that Sutskever was speaking facetiously, but it's also conceivable that as the top researcher at one of the foremost AI groups in the world, he's already looking downrange. He's long been preoccupied with artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which would refer to AI that operates at a human or superhuman level.
Snow Lake Lithium to Develop World's First All-Electric Lithium Mine
Snow Lake Lithium is committed to creating and operating a fully renewable and sustainable lithium mine that can deliver a completely traceable, carbon-neutral, and zero harm product to the electric vehicle and battery markets. Snow Lake Lithium is a leading fully integrated, carbon-neutral lithium hydroxide provider operated by renewable hydroelectric power. Today, electric vehicles (EVs) run on Lithium-ion batteries. Lithium, therefore, is a critical, in-demand component of batteries needed for EVs, and securing domestic lithium hydroxide supply to the North American electric vehicle industry is a critical process in ensuring sustainability in the near future. Snow Lake Lithium has outlined plans to develop the world's first all-electric Lithium mine in Manitoba, Canada developing a domestic supply of this critical resource to the North American electric vehicle industry.
How artificial intelligence can be used to identify solar panel defects
For example, if you are running a computer vision algorithm to identify solar panel defects, you are engaging in AI, ML, and CV. In contrast, if you are translating words from English to Spanish using an algorithm, that is more likely to be AI or ML, not CV. Most AI inspection projects in the solar panel industry are typically computer vision (CV) initiatives. This means that an algorithm uses images to identify solar panel defects. The use of AI and CV in solar panel inspection is relatively novel.
A Unified Perspective on Value Backup and Exploration in Monte-Carlo Tree Search
Dam, Tuan, D'Eramo, Carlo, Peters, Jan, Pajarinen, Joni
Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) is a class of methods for solving complex decision-making problems through the synergy of Monte-Carlo planning and Reinforcement Learning (RL). The highly combinatorial nature of the problems commonly addressed by MCTS requires the use of efficient exploration strategies for navigating the planning tree and quickly convergent value backup methods. These crucial problems are particularly evident in recent advances that combine MCTS with deep neural networks for function approximation. In this work, we propose two methods for improving the convergence rate and exploration based on a newly introduced backup operator and entropy regularization. We provide strong theoretical guarantees to bound convergence rate, approximation error, and regret of our methods. Moreover, we introduce a mathematical framework based on the use of the $\alpha$-divergence for backup and exploration in MCTS. We show that this theoretical formulation unifies different approaches, including our newly introduced ones, under the same mathematical framework, allowing to obtain different methods by simply changing the value of $\alpha$. In practice, our unified perspective offers a flexible way to balance between exploration and exploitation by tuning the single $\alpha$ parameter according to the problem at hand. We validate our methods through a rigorous empirical study from basic toy problems to the complex Atari games, and including both MDP and POMDP problems.
Bernstein Flows for Flexible Posteriors in Variational Bayes
Dürr, Oliver, Hörling, Stephan, Dold, Daniel, Kovylov, Ivonne, Sick, Beate
Variational inference (VI) is a technique to approximate difficult to compute posteriors by optimization. In contrast to MCMC, VI scales to many observations. In the case of complex posteriors, however, state-of-the-art VI approaches often yield unsatisfactory posterior approximations. This paper presents Bernstein flow variational inference (BF-VI), a robust and easy-to-use method, flexible enough to approximate complex multivariate posteriors. BF-VI combines ideas from normalizing flows and Bernstein polynomial-based transformation models. In benchmark experiments, we compare BF-VI solutions with exact posteriors, MCMC solutions, and state-of-the-art VI methods including normalizing flow based VI. We show for low-dimensional models that BF-VI accurately approximates the true posterior; in higher-dimensional models, BF-VI outperforms other VI methods. Further, we develop with BF-VI a Bayesian model for the semi-structured Melanoma challenge data, combining a CNN model part for image data with an interpretable model part for tabular data, and demonstrate for the first time how the use of VI in semi-structured models.
Cooperative Solutions to Exploration Tasks Under Speed and Budget Constraints
We present a multi-agent system where agents can cooperate to solve a system of dependent tasks, with agents having the capability to explore a solution space, make inferences, as well as query for information under a limited budget. Re-exploration of the solution space takes place by an agent when an older solution expires and is thus able to adapt to dynamic changes in the environment. We investigate the effects of task dependencies, with highly-dependent graph $G_{40}$ (a well-known program graph that contains $40$ highly interlinked nodes, each representing a task) and less-dependent graphs $G_{18}$ (a program graph that contains $18$ tasks with fewer links), increasing the speed of the agents and the complexity of the problem space and the query budgets available to agents. Specifically, we evaluate trade-offs between the agent's speed and query budget. During the experiments, we observed that increasing the speed of a single agent improves the system performance to a certain point only, and increasing the number of faster agents may not improve the system performance due to task dependencies. Favoring faster agents during budget allocation enhances the system performance, in line with the "Matthew effect." We also observe that allocating more budget to a faster agent gives better performance for a less-dependent system, but increasing the number of faster agents gives a better performance for a highly-dependent system.