Energy
Three killed in suspected Houthi drone attacks in UAE: Live
A suspected drone attack by Yemen's Houthi rebels targeting a key oil facility in Abu Dhabi killed three people and started a separate fire at Abu Dhabi's international airport, police said. Police in the United Arab Emirates identified the dead as two Indian nationals and one Pakistani. "Small flying objects" were found as three petrol tanks exploded in an industrial area and a fire was ignited at the airport, police said, as Houthi rebels announced "military operations" in the UAE. The UAE which had largely scaled down its military presence in Yemen in 2019, continues to hold sway through the Yemeni forces it armed and trained. Drone attacks are a hallmark of the Houthis' assaults on Saudi Arabia, the UAE ally that is leading the coalition fighting for Yemen's government in the grinding civil war.
Scientists Are Mapping Every Solar Panel in the World With Machine Learning
An astonishing 82% decrease in the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy since 2010 has given the world a fighting chance to build a zero-emissions energy system which might be less costly than the fossil-fuelled system it replaces. The International Energy Agency projects that PV solar generating capacity must grow ten-fold by 2040 if we are to meet the dual tasks of alleviating global poverty and constraining warming to well below 3.6 F (2 C). Solar is "intermittent", since sunshine varies during the day and across seasons, so energy must be stored for when the sun doesn't shine. Policy must also be designed to ensure solar energy reaches the furthest corners of the world and places where it is most needed. And there will be inevitable trade-offs between solar energy and other uses for the same land, including conservation and biodiversity, agriculture and food systems, and community and indigenous uses.
Probabilistic Mass Mapping with Neural Score Estimation
Remy, Benjamin, Lanusse, Francois, Jeffrey, Niall, Liu, Jia, Starck, Jean-Luc, Osato, Ken, Schrabback, Tim
Weak lensing mass-mapping is a useful tool to access the full distribution of dark matter on the sky, but because of intrinsic galaxy ellipticies and finite fields/missing data, the recovery of dark matter maps constitutes a challenging ill-posed inverse problem. We introduce a novel methodology allowing for efficient sampling of the high-dimensional Bayesian posterior of the weak lensing mass-mapping problem, and relying on simulations for defining a fully non-Gaussian prior. We aim to demonstrate the accuracy of the method on simulations, and then proceed to applying it to the mass reconstruction of the HST/ACS COSMOS field. The proposed methodology combines elements of Bayesian statistics, analytic theory, and a recent class of Deep Generative Models based on Neural Score Matching. This approach allows us to do the following: 1) Make full use of analytic cosmological theory to constrain the 2pt statistics of the solution. 2) Learn from cosmological simulations any differences between this analytic prior and full simulations. 3) Obtain samples from the full Bayesian posterior of the problem for robust Uncertainty Quantification. We demonstrate the method on the $\kappa$TNG simulations and find that the posterior mean significantly outperfoms previous methods (Kaiser-Squires, Wiener filter, Sparsity priors) both on root-mean-square error and in terms of the Pearson correlation. We further illustrate the interpretability of the recovered posterior by establishing a close correlation between posterior convergence values and SNR of clusters artificially introduced into a field. Finally, we apply the method to the reconstruction of the HST/ACS COSMOS field and yield the highest quality convergence map of this field to date.
Innovative New Algorithms Advance the Computing Power of Early-Stage Quantum Computers
A group of scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory has developed computational quantum algorithms that are capable of efficient and highly accurate simulations of static and dynamic properties of quantum systems. The algorithms are valuable tools to gain greater insight into the physics and chemistry of complex materials, and they are specifically designed to work on existing and near-future quantum computers. Scientist Yong-Xin Yao and his research partners at Ames Lab use the power of advanced computers to speed discovery in condensed matter physics, modeling incredibly complex quantum mechanics and how they change over ultra-fast timescales. Current high performance computers can model the properties of very simple, small quantum systems, but larger or more complex systems rapidly expand the number of calculations a computer must perform to arrive at an accurate model, slowing the pace not only of computation, but also discovery. "This is a real challenge given the current early-stage of existing quantum computing capabilities," said Yao, "but it is also a very promising opportunity, since these calculations overwhelm classical computer systems, or take far too long to provide timely answers."
This delightful AI generates words that sound real but aren't
Have you ever heard of a lachetous vine? Maybe you just finished up some worryless tasks? Those words sound vaguely familiar -- perhaps you think you've heard them before but aren't sure you could explicitly define them. That's because they're gibberish -- part of an endless stream of words conjured up by an algorithm programmed to make new words that sound as believable as possible. The made-up words are generated by the website thisworddoesnotexist.com, which is a creation of former Instagram engineer Thomas Dimson, The Verge reports.
Adaptive Energy Management for Self-Sustainable Wearables in Mobile Health
Hussein, Dina, Bhat, Ganapati, Doppa, Janardhan Rao
Wearable devices that integrate multiple sensors, processors, and communication technologies have the potential to transform mobile health for remote monitoring of health parameters. However, the small form factor of the wearable devices limits the battery size and operating lifetime. As a result, the devices require frequent recharging, which has limited their widespread adoption. Energy harvesting has emerged as an effective method towards sustainable operation of wearable devices. Unfortunately, energy harvesting alone is not sufficient to fulfill the energy requirements of wearable devices. This paper studies the novel problem of adaptive energy management towards the goal of self-sustainable wearables by using harvested energy to supplement the battery energy and to reduce manual recharging by users. To solve this problem, we propose a principled algorithm referred as AdaEM. There are two key ideas behind AdaEM. First, it uses machine learning (ML) methods to learn predictive models of user activity and energy usage patterns. These models allow us to estimate the potential of energy harvesting in a day as a function of the user activities. Second, it reasons about the uncertainty in predictions and estimations from the ML models to optimize the energy management decisions using a dynamic robust optimization (DyRO) formulation. We propose a light-weight solution for DyRO to meet the practical needs of deployment. We validate the AdaEM approach on a wearable device prototype consisting of solar and motion energy harvesting using real-world data of user activities. Experiments show that AdaEM achieves solutions that are within 5% of the optimal with less than 0.005% execution time and energy overhead.
Fully Convolutional Change Detection Framework with Generative Adversarial Network for Unsupervised, Weakly Supervised and Regional Supervised Change Detection
Wu, Chen, Du, Bo, Zhang, Liangpei
Abstract--Deep learning for change detection is one of the current hot topics in the field of remote sensing. However, most endto-end networks are proposed for supervised change detection, and unsupervised change detection models depend on traditional pre-detection methods. Therefore, we proposed a fully convolutional change detection framework with generative adversarial network, to conclude unsupervised, weakly supervised, regional supervised, and fully supervised change detection tasks into one framework. A basic Unet segmentor is used to obtain change detection map, an image-to-image generator is implemented to model the spectral and spatial variation between multi-temporal images, and a discriminator for changed and unchanged is proposed for modeling the semantic changes in weakly and regional supervised change detection task. The iterative optimization of segmentor and generator can build an end-to-end network for unsupervised change detection, the adversarial process between segmentor and discriminator can provide the solutions for weakly and regional supervised change detection, the segmentor itself can be trained for fully supervised task. The experiments indicate the effectiveness of the propsed framework in unsupervised, weakly supervised and regional supervised change detection. This paper provides theorical definitions for unsupervised, weakly supervised and regional supervised change detection tasks, and shows great potentials in exploring end-to-end network for remote sensing change detection. It changes and non-changes by pre-detection, and use aims at finding landscape changes from the multi-temporal the corresponding patches as training samples to build a remote sensing images observing the same study site deep network model to extract better features and discriminate at different time. It has been widely used in land-use/landcover semantic labels [25-27].
Computing With Light
This article will look at a technology for AI inference processing using light rather than electrons from LIghtmatter and combined with traditional CMOS including SRAM memory. This article is based upon an interview with Lightmatter CEO, Nick Harris. The company sees this product being useful for data center inference and perhaps eventually in some AI computation intensive industrial and consumer applications (such as autonomous vehicles). There are widely cited forecasts that project accelerating information and communications technology (ICT) energy consumption increases through the 2020's with a 2018 Nature article estimating that if current trends continue, this will consume more than 20% of electricity demand by 2030. At several industry events I have heard talks that say one of the important limits of data center performance will be the amount of energy consumed.
AI Weekly: What can AI tell us about social unrest, virus structures, and carbon emissions?
Did you miss a session from the Future of Work Summit? Applying data science to predict unrest. AI that can anticipate the next variant of COVID-19's structure. That's a few of the headlines in AI this week, which ran the gamut from the dour (how AI might prevent the next attack on the U.S. Capitol) to the uplifting (making air travel greener). It's caveated optimism, but nonetheless a breath of fresh air in a community that's becoming increasingly cynical about the technology's potential to do good.