By automating scientific processes and introducing artificial intelligence for decision-making, TRI's new closed-loop research platforms free up scientists' time for more creative tasks. When I first started graduate school almost 10 years ago, I was mixing ingredients by hand, writing down reaction conditions on a piece of paper, and grabbing a quick lunch in between lab sessions. At that time, the idea of a robot doing my experiments -- or using machine learning to predict the outcomes of my reactions -- would have never occurred to me. I accepted a future as a scientist where I would only be able to explore a tiny fraction of the billions of possible materials in the universe by hand. If lucky, a scientific discovery might arrive serendipitously as I became better at making "educated guesses."

Airstream is testing an electric travel trailer that could go off-grid for weeks at a time, park itself into a camping spot and help propel itself down the road. The trailer, called the eStream, would be the first electric-powered camper in the U.S., according to the company. "There's nothing like it in the industry," said Bob Wheeler, CEO and president of the Jackson Center, Ohio, company. Airstream introduced the trailer at an RV show in Tampa two weeks ago. PLAY WORDLE?:This is the best starting word to use, according to a math expert The 22-foot-long trailer, in Airstream's singular "silver bullet" design, would include batteries under the floor that would propel the trailer's two wheels, significantly reducing the power required to tow the trailer.

We present a conflict-based approach to diagnosing Discrete Event Systems (DES) which generalises Reiter's Diagnose algorithm to a much broader class of problems. This approach obviates the need to explicitly reconstruct the system's behaviors that are consistent with the observation, as is typical of existing DES diagnosis algorithms. Instead, our algorithm explores the space of diagnosis hypotheses, testing hypotheses for consistency, and generating conflicts which rule out successors and other portions of the search space. Under relatively mild assumptions, our algorithm correctly computes the set of preferred diagnosis candidates. We investigate efficient symbolic representations of the hypotheses space and provide a SAT-based implementation of this framework which is used to address a real-world problem in processing alarms for a power transmission system.

We develop multivariate copulas for modeling multiple joint distributions of wind speeds at a wind farm site and neighboring wind source. A ndimensional Gaussian copula and multiple copula graphical models enhance the quality of the prediction site distribution. The models, in comparison to multiple regression, achieve higher accuracy and lower cost because they require less sensing data.

Smart grids enhance power grids by integrating electronic equipment, communication systems and computational tools. In a smart grid, consumers can insert energy into the power grid. We propose a new energy management system (called RLbEMS) that autonomously defines a policy for selling or storing energy surplus in smart homes. This policy is achieved through Batch Reinforcement Learning with historical data about energy prices, energy generation, consumer demand and characteristics of storage systems. In practical problems, RLbEMS has learned good energy selling policies quickly and effectively. We obtained maximum gains of 20.78% and 10.64%, when compared to a Naive-greedy policy, for smart homes located in Brazil and in the USA, respectively. Another important result achieved by RLbEMS was the reduction of about 30% of peak demand, a central desideratum for smart grids.

We present a novel negotiation protocol to facilitate energy exchange between off-grid homes that are equipped with renewable energy generation and electricity storage. Our protocol imposes restrictions over negotiation such that it reduces the complex interdependent multi-issue negotiation to one where agents have a strategy profile in subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. We show that our protocol is concurrent, scalable and; under certain conditions; leads to Pareto-optimal outcomes.

Exploiting parallelism is a key strategy for speeding up computation. However, on hard combinatorial problems, such a strategy has been surprisingly challenging due to the intricate variable interactions.We introduce a novel way in which parallelism can be used to exploit hidden structure of hard combinatorial problems. Our approach complements divide-and-conquer and portfolio approaches. We evaluate our approach on the minimum set basis problem: a core combinatorial problem with a range of applications in optimization, machine learning, and system security. We also highlight a novel sustainability related application, concerning the discovery of new materials for renewable energy sources such as improved fuel cell catalysts.

There has recently been an increased emphasis on reducing energy consumption in manufacturing, driven by the fluctuations in energy costs and the growing importance given to environmental impact of manufactured goods. Lots of attention has been given to the reduction of machine tools energy consumption, as they require large amounts of energy to perform manufacturing tasks. One area that has received relatively little interest, yet could harness great potential, is reducing energy consumption by planning machine activities between manufacturing operations, while the machine is not in use. The intuitive option --which is currently exploited in manufacturing-- is to leave the machine in a normal operating state in anticipation of the next manufacturing job. However, this is far from optimal due to the thermal deformation phenomenon, which usually require an energy-intensive warm-up cycle in order to bring all the components (e.g.

Battery life is yet one of the main limiting factors to a robot's total mission time, and efficient energy management is paramount in a robotic application. In this paper, we integrate energy awareness in the path planning of a mobile robot performing autonomous navigation. Our contributions are: 1) The formalization of a planning domain for mobile robot path planning which accounts for energy consumption and integrates energy actions in the generated plans; 2) A proof of concept of automatic path planning that avoids high energy areas in a known environment. We test our approach in simulation, extending an embedded computer's total battery discharge time by approximately 42.8%, and in a real ground mobile robot, achieving a mean energy draw reduction of 52.02%, both compared to conventional path planning.

Automated analysis methods are crucial aids for monitoring and defending a network to protect the sensitive or confidential data it hosts. This work introduces a flexible, powerful, and unsupervised approach to detecting anomalous behavior in computer and network logs; one that largely eliminates domain-dependent feature engineering employed by existing methods. By treating system logs as threads of interleaved sentences'' (event log lines) to train online unsupervised neural network language models, our approach provides an adaptive model of normal network behavior. We compare the effectiveness of both standard and bidirectional recurrent neural network language models at detecting malicious activity within network log data. Extending these models, we introduce a tiered recurrent architecture, which provides context by modeling sequences of users' actions over time. Compared to Isolation Forest and Principal Components Analysis, two popular anomaly detection algorithms, we observe superior performance on the Los Alamos National Laboratory Cyber Security dataset. For log-line-level red team detection, our best performing character-based model provides test set area under the receiver operator characteristic curve of 0.98, demonstrating the strong fine-grained anomaly detection performance of this approach on open vocabulary logging sources.