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How artificial intelligence can help reduce carbon emissions

#artificialintelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is scientific intelligence that is mostly used by machines. It involves the use of large data sets of instruction that a computer follows to perform a particular task. The more detailed these instructions are, the more accurate the result. In this article, we will look into how you can use Artificial Intelligence to cut down your carbon emission. To solve a problem with AI, there's a need to approach the problem by thinking about a step-by-step solution.


AI learns physics to optimize particle accelerator performance

#artificialintelligence

Machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, vastly speeds up computational tasks and enables new technology in areas as broad as speech and image recognition, self-driving cars, stock market trading and medical diagnosis. Before going to work on a given task, machine learning algorithms typically need to be trained on pre-existing data so they can learn to make fast and accurate predictions about future scenarios on their own. But what if the job is a completely new one, with no data available for training? Now, researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have demonstrated that they can use machine learning to optimize the performance of particle accelerators by teaching the algorithms the basic physics principles behind accelerator operations--no prior data needed. "Injecting physics into machine learning is a really hot topic in many research areas--in materials science, environmental science, battery research, particle physics and more," said Adi Hanuka, a former SLAC research associate who led a study published in Physical Review Accelerator and Beams.


Dell pulls energy-hungry gaming PCs in six US states after failing efficiency rules

The Guardian > Energy

PC maker Dell says it has stopped shipping some versions of its powerful gaming systems to California and five other US states because the products do not meet new energy efficiency standards. Dell said in a statement sent to Reuters the regulations affected "select configurations" of its Alienware Aurora R10 and R12 gaming PCs. Gaming PCs made by Dell and others use powerful chips for cutting-edge graphics in video games. Those components mean gaming systems typically consume far more electricity than an average computer. California's toughened efficiency regulations for computers went into effect on 1 July.


The Need and Status of Sea Turtle Conservation and Survey of Associated Computer Vision Advances

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

For over hundreds of millions of years, sea turtles and their ancestors have swum in the vast expanses of the ocean. They have undergone a number of evolutionary changes, leading to speciation and sub-speciation. However, in the past few decades, some of the most notable forces driving the genetic variance and population decline have been global warming and anthropogenic impact ranging from large-scale poaching, collecting turtle eggs for food, besides dumping trash including plastic waste into the ocean. This leads to severe detrimental effects in the sea turtle population, driving them to extinction. This research focusses on the forces causing the decline in sea turtle population, the necessity for the global conservation efforts along with its successes and failures, followed by an in-depth analysis of the modern advances in detection and recognition of sea turtles, involving Machine Learning and Computer Vision systems, aiding the conservation efforts.


Non-intrusive reduced order modeling of natural convection in porous media using convolutional autoencoders: comparison with linear subspace techniques

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Natural convection in porous media is a highly nonlinear multiphysical problem relevant to many engineering applications (e.g., the process of $\mathrm{CO_2}$ sequestration). Here, we present a non-intrusive reduced order model of natural convection in porous media employing deep convolutional autoencoders for the compression and reconstruction and either radial basis function (RBF) interpolation or artificial neural networks (ANNs) for mapping parameters of partial differential equations (PDEs) on the corresponding nonlinear manifolds. To benchmark our approach, we also describe linear compression and reconstruction processes relying on proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) and ANNs. We present comprehensive comparisons among different models through three benchmark problems. The reduced order models, linear and nonlinear approaches, are much faster than the finite element model, obtaining a maximum speed-up of $7 \times 10^{6}$ because our framework is not bound by the Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition; hence, it could deliver quantities of interest at any given time contrary to the finite element model. Our model's accuracy still lies within a mean squared error of 0.07 (two-order of magnitude lower than the maximum value of the finite element results) in the worst-case scenario. We illustrate that, in specific settings, the nonlinear approach outperforms its linear counterpart and vice versa. We hypothesize that a visual comparison between principal component analysis (PCA) or t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) could indicate which method will perform better prior to employing any specific compression strategy.


Neural Networks for Parameter Estimation in Intractable Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We propose to use deep learning to estimate parameters in statistical models when standard likelihood estimation methods are computationally infeasible. We show how to estimate parameters from max-stable processes, where inference is exceptionally challenging even with small datasets but simulation is straightforward. We use data from model simulations as input and train deep neural networks to learn statistical parameters. Our neural-network-based method provides a competitive alternative to current approaches, as demonstrated by considerable accuracy and computational time improvements. It serves as a proof of concept for deep learning in statistical parameter estimation and can be extended to other estimation problems.


Exact and Heuristic Approaches to Drone Delivery Problems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Flying Sidekick Traveling Salesman Problem (FSTSP) considers a delivery system composed by a truck and a drone. The drone launches from the truck with a single package to deliver to a customer. Each drone must return to the truck to recharge batteries, pick up another package, and launch again to a new customer location. This work proposes a novel Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) formulation and a heuristic approach to address the problem. The proposedMIP formulation yields better linear relaxation bounds than previously proposed formulations for all instances, and was capable of optimally solving several unsolved instances from the literature. A hybrid heuristic based on the General Variable Neighborhood Search metaheuristic combining Tabu Search concepts is employed to obtain high-quality solutions for large-size instances. The efficiency of the algorithm was evaluated on 1415 benchmark instances from the literature, and over 80% of the best known solutions were improved.


Spatio-temporal estimation of wind speed and wind power using machine learning: predictions, uncertainty and technical potential

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The growth of wind generation capacities in the past decades has shown that wind energy can contribute to the energy transition in many parts of the world. Being highly variable and complex to model, the quantification of the spatio-temporal variation of wind power and the related uncertainty is highly relevant for energy planners. Machine Learning has become a popular tool to perform wind-speed and power predictions. However, the existing approaches have several limitations. These include (i) insufficient consideration of spatio-temporal correlations in wind-speed data, (ii) a lack of existing methodologies to quantify the uncertainty of wind speed prediction and its propagation to the wind-power estimation, and (iii) a focus on less than hourly frequencies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a framework to reconstruct a spatio-temporal field on a regular grid from irregularly distributed wind-speed measurements. After decomposing data into temporally referenced basis functions and their corresponding spatially distributed coefficients, the latter are spatially modelled using Extreme Learning Machines. Estimates of both model and prediction uncertainties, and of their propagation after the transformation of wind speed into wind power, are then provided without any assumptions on distribution patterns of the data. The methodology is applied to the study of hourly wind power potential on a grid of $250\times 250$ m$^2$ for turbines of 100 meters hub height in Switzerland, generating the first dataset of its type for the country. The potential wind power generation is combined with the available area for wind turbine installations to yield an estimate of the technical potential for wind power in Switzerland. The wind power estimate presented here represents an important input for planners to support the design of future energy systems with increased wind power generation.


Random vector functional link neural network based ensemble deep learning for short-term load forecasting

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Electricity load forecasting is crucial for the power systems' planning and maintenance. However, its un-stationary and non-linear characteristics impose significant difficulties in anticipating future demand. This paper proposes a novel ensemble deep Random Vector Functional Link (edRVFL) network for electricity load forecasting. The weights of hidden layers are randomly initialized and kept fixed during the training process. The hidden layers are stacked to enforce deep representation learning. Then, the model generates the forecasts by ensembling the outputs of each layer. Moreover, we also propose to augment the random enhancement features by empirical wavelet transformation (EWT). The raw load data is decomposed by EWT in a walk-forward fashion, not introducing future data leakage problems in the decomposition process. Finally, all the sub-series generated by the EWT, including raw data, are fed into the edRVFL for forecasting purposes. The proposed model is evaluated on twenty publicly available time series from the Australian Energy Market Operator of the year 2020. The simulation results demonstrate the proposed model's superior performance over eleven forecasting methods in three error metrics and statistical tests on electricity load forecasting tasks.


Learning the temporal evolution of multivariate densities via normalizing flows

arXiv.org Machine Learning

In this work, we propose a method to learn probability distributions using sample path data from stochastic differential equations. Specifically, we consider temporally evolving probability distributions (e.g., those produced by integrating local or nonlocal Fokker-Planck equations). We analyze this evolution through machine learning assisted construction of a time-dependent mapping that takes a reference distribution (say, a Gaussian) to each and every instance of our evolving distribution. If the reference distribution is the initial condition of a Fokker-Planck equation, what we learn is the time-T map of the corresponding solution. Specifically, the learned map is a normalizing flow that deforms the support of the reference density to the support of each and every density snapshot in time. We demonstrate that this approach can learn solutions to non-local Fokker-Planck equations, such as those arising in systems driven by both Brownian and L\'evy noise. We present examples with two- and three-dimensional, uni- and multimodal distributions to validate the method.