We consider the problem of open-goal planning for robotic cloth manipulation. Core of our system is a neural network trained as a forward model of cloth behaviour under manipulation, with planning performed through backpropagation. We introduce a neural network-based routine for estimating mesh representations from voxel input, and perform planning in mesh format internally. We address the problem of planning with incomplete domain knowledge by means of an explicit epistemic uncertainty signal. This signal is calculated from prediction divergence between two instances of the forward model network and used to avoid epistemic uncertainty during planning. Finally, we introduce logic for handling restriction of grasp points to a discrete set of candidates, in order to accommodate graspability constraints imposed by robotic hardware. We evaluate the system's mesh estimation, prediction, and planning ability on simulated cloth for sequences of one to three manipulations. Comparative experiments confirm that planning on basis of estimated meshes improves accuracy compared to voxel-based planning, and that epistemic uncertainty avoidance improves performance under conditions of incomplete domain knowledge. We additionally present qualitative results on robot hardware.

Road transportation is one of the largest sectors of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions affecting climate change. Tackling climate change as a global community will require new capabilities to measure and inventory road transport emissions. However, the large scale and distributed nature of vehicle emissions make this sector especially challenging for existing inventory methods. In this work, we develop machine learning models that use satellite imagery to perform indirect top-down estimation of road transport emissions. Our initial experiments focus on the United States, where a bottom-up inventory was available for training our models. We achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 39.5 kg CO$_{2}$ of annual road transport emissions, calculated on a pixel-by-pixel (100 m$^{2}$) basis in Sentinel-2 imagery. We also discuss key model assumptions and challenges that need to be addressed to develop models capable of generalizing to global geography. We believe this work is the first published approach for automated indirect top-down estimation of road transport sector emissions using visual imagery and represents a critical step towards scalable, global, near-real-time road transportation emissions inventories that are measured both independently and objectively.

A study carried out jointly by Stanford University, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) demonstrated the use of machine learning algorithms to understand the lifecycle of lithium-ion batteries. Until now, machine learning in battery technology was limited to identifying patterns in data to speed up scientific analysis. The latest discovery will help researchers in designing and developing longer-lasting batteries. The research team has been working to develop a long-lasting electric vehicle battery that can be charged in 10 minutes. "Battery technology is important for any type of electric powertrain. By understanding the fundamental reactions that occur within the battery we can extend its life, enable faster charging and ultimately design better battery materials. We look forward to building on this work through future experiments to achieve lower-cost, better-performing batteries," said Patrick Herring, a senior scientist of Toyota Research Institute.

Normalizing flows are a powerful technique for obtaining reparameterizable samples from complex multimodal distributions. Unfortunately, current approaches are only available for the most basic geometries and fall short when the underlying space has a nontrivial topology, limiting their applicability for most real-world data. Using fundamental ideas from differential geometry and geometric control theory, we describe how the recently introduced Neural ODEs and continuous normalizing flows can be extended to arbitrary smooth manifolds. We propose a general methodology for parameterizing vector fields on these spaces and demonstrate how gradient-based learning can be performed. Additionally, we provide a scalable unbiased estimator for the divergence in this generalized setting. Experiments on a diverse selection of spaces empirically showcase the defined framework's ability to obtain reparameterizable samples from complex distributions.

Bayesian experimental design (BED) is to answer the question that how to choose designs that maximize the information gathering. For implicit models, where the likelihood is intractable but sampling is possible, conventional BED methods have difficulties in efficiently estimating the posterior distribution and maximizing the mutual information (MI) between data and parameters. Recent work proposed the use of gradient ascent to maximize a lower bound on MI to deal with these issues. However, the approach requires a sampling path to compute the pathwise gradient of the MI lower bound with respect to the design variables, and such a pathwise gradient is usually inaccessible for implicit models. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages recent advances in stochastic approximate gradient ascent incorporated with a smoothed variational MI estimator for efficient and robust BED. Without the necessity of pathwise gradients, our approach allows the design process to be achieved through a unified procedure with an approximate gradient for implicit models. Several experiments show that our approach outperforms baseline methods, and significantly improves the scalability of BED in high-dimensional problems.

The building sector consumes the largest energy in the world, and there have been considerable research interests in energy consumption and comfort management of buildings. Inspired by recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL), this paper aims at assessing the potential of RL in building climate control problems with occupant interaction. We apply a recent RL approach, called DDPG (deep deterministic policy gradient), for the continuous building control tasks and assess its performance with simulation studies in terms of its ability to handle (a) the partial state observability due to sensor limitations; (b) complex stochastic system with high-dimensional state-spaces, which are jointly continuous and discrete; (c) uncertainties due to ambient weather conditions, occupant's behavior, and comfort feelings. Especially, the partial observability and uncertainty due to the occupant interaction significantly complicate the control problem. Through simulation studies, the policy learned by DDPG demonstrates reasonable performance and computational tractability.

London March 10, 2021 – Using blockchain to democratize machine learning, GNY today launched the world's first blockchain providing access to powerful machine learning functionalities on a secure and collaborative decentralized platform. Empowering businesses and organizations to solve large and complex problems, GNY's Mainnet will enable users to utilize its blockchain architecture to run machine learning analysis of any type of data – from financial records to public health information – without risking sensitive data theft. The Mainnet launches with 5 machine learning use cases, which will expand to dozens by the end of 2021 and eventually hundreds. The launch comes after 18 months of development and rigorous testing. To demonstrate its potential impact, one GNY test revealed how researchers could use Mainnet to set up a private blockchain to run comparative analysis of daily COVID-19 mortalities from individual cities.

Time series have attracted widespread attention in many fields today. Based on the analysis of complex networks and visibility graph theory, a new time series forecasting method is proposed. In time series analysis, visibility graph theory transforms time series data into a network model. In the network model, the node similarity index is an important factor. On the basis of directly using the node prediction method with the largest similarity, the node similarity index is used as the weight coefficient to optimize the prediction algorithm. Compared with the single-point sampling node prediction algorithm, the multi-point sampling prediction algorithm can provide more accurate prediction values when the data set is sufficient. According to results of experiments on four real-world representative datasets, the method has more accurate forecasting ability and can provide more accurate forecasts in the field of time series and actual scenes.

We review our recent work in the area of autonomous materials research, highlighting the coupling of machine learning methods and models and more problem-aware modeling. We review the general Bayesian framework for closed-loop design employed by many autonomous materials platforms. We then provide examples of our work on such platforms. We finally review our approaches to extend current statistical and ML models to better reflect problem-specific structure including the use of physics-based models and incorporation of operational considerations into the decision-making procedure.

The manifold Helmholtzian (1-Laplacian) operator $\Delta_1$ elegantly generalizes the Laplace-Beltrami operator to vector fields on a manifold $\mathcal M$. In this work, we propose the estimation of the manifold Helmholtzian from point cloud data by a weighted 1-Laplacian $\mathbf{\mathcal L}_1$. While higher order Laplacians ave been introduced and studied, this work is the first to present a graph Helmholtzian constructed from a simplicial complex as an estimator for the continuous operator in a non-parametric setting. Equipped with the geometric and topological information about $\mathcal M$, the Helmholtzian is a useful tool for the analysis of flows and vector fields on $\mathcal M$ via the Helmholtz-Hodge theorem. In addition, the $\mathbf{\mathcal L}_1$ allows the smoothing, prediction, and feature extraction of the flows. We demonstrate these possibilities on substantial sets of synthetic and real point cloud datasets with non-trivial topological structures; and provide theoretical results on the limit of $\mathbf{\mathcal L}_1$ to $\Delta_1$.