Energy
Artificial-Intelligence Software Company C3.ai Raised Its Expected IPO Price Range
C3.ai is expected to go public on Wednesday. The company will have about 109 million fully diluted shares outstanding after the offering and two concurrent private placements: Microsoft (MSFT) has agreed to buy $50 million of stock at the IPO price, while Spring Creek Capital, an affiliate of Koch Industries, has pledged to invest $100 million on the same basis. At the top of the range, the company would be worth about $4.1 billion. The company will trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AI. The underwriting group for the deal is led by Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and BofA Securities.
Deep Learning based Multi-Modal Sensing for Tracking and State Extraction of Small Quadcopters
Zhang, Zhibo, Zeng, Chen, Dhameliya, Maulikkumar, Chowdhury, Souma, Rai, Rahul
This paper proposes a multi-sensor based approach to detect, track, and localize a quadcopter unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Specifically, a pipeline is developed to process monocular RGB and thermal video (captured from a fixed platform) to detect and track the UAV in our FoV. Subsequently, a 2D planar lidar is used to allow conversion of pixel data to actual distance measurements, and thereby enable localization of the UAV in global coordinates. The monocular data is processed through a deep learning-based object detection method that computes an initial bounding box for the UAV. The thermal data is processed through a thresholding and Kalman filter approach to detect and track the bounding box. Training and testing data are prepared by combining a set of original experiments conducted in a motion capture environment and publicly available UAV image data. The new pipeline compares favorably to existing methods and demonstrates promising tracking and localization capacity of sample experiments.
Beyond 4D Tracking: Using Cluster Shapes for Track Seeding
Fox, Patrick J., Huang, Shangqing, Isaacson, Joshua, Ju, Xiangyang, Nachman, Benjamin
Analyzing data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) present a hyper challenge. A given collision event may result in hundreds of outgoing particles, each with many features (momentum, electric charge, etc.). This hyper variate phase space is then observed by complex multi-channel detectors that are essentially hyperspectral cameras. The LHC detectors have millions of readout channels and dimensionality reduction is essential for data analysis. One natural and nearly lossless reduction is the reconstruction of charged particle trajectories ('tracks'). The innermost layers of the detectors at the LHC are constructed to register the passage of charged particles without significantly altering the particle energy or direction. In the ATLAS and CMS detectors, this is achieved using silicon sensors that are finely segmented in one or two directions and are called strips and pixels, respectively. We will focus on pixels, although our methodology applies more generally. Typically, the first step in a tracking algorithm is the construction of seeds, which are sets of three or more hit pixel clusters that can be used to fit charged-particle trajectories (see e.g.
Active machine learning for spatio-temporal predictions using feature embedding
Aryandoust, Arsam, Pfenninger, Stefan
Active learning (AL) could contribute to solving critical environmental problems through improved spatiotemporal predictions. Yet such predictions involve high-dimensional feature spaces with mixed data types and missing data, which existing methods have difficulties dealing with. Here, we propose a novel batch AL method that fills this gap. We encode and cluster features of candidate data points, and query the best data based on the distance of embedded features to their cluster centers. We introduce a new metric of informativeness that we call embedding entropy and a general class of neural networks that we call embedding networks for using it. Empirical tests on forecasting electricity demand show a simultaneous reduction in average prediction RMSE by up to 63-88% and data usage by up to 50-69% compared to passive learning (PL) benchmarks. Examples include the electricity consumption of buildings, required to operate sustainable power grids; the travel time between city zones, required for the smart charging of electric vehicles; and meteorological conditions, required for weather-based forecasting of wind and solar electricity generation. Sensing and labeling the ground truth data that is necessary for making these predictions in time and space usually comes at a high cost. This cost constrains the total number of sensors that we can place and use to query new data. A fundamental question that arises for many spatiotemporal prediction tasks is where and when to measure and query the data required to make the best possible predictions while staying within a maximum budget for sensors and data.
Tripp Lite AVR900U UPS review: This uninterruptible power supply has the wrong set of features
The 12-outlet Tripp Lite AVR900U is the wrong intersection of perfectly fine separate features in an otherwise well-made model. Its reasonable battery size could support a tricked-out computer system with multiple displays and peripherals for a few to several minutes during a power outage. The line-interactive approach incorporated in its design provides fast power switch over (as quick as a few milliseconds) along with constant power conditioning to correct for minor fluctuations without wearing out the internal battery. On the other hand, the AVR900U relies on simulated power switching instead of a "pure" sine wave. That means it's not the right choice for computers with active power factor correction (PFC).
Why You'll Never Drive a Car Anymore: Everything You Need to Know
One of the things I love about Elon Musk is that he really wants to change the world for the better. You should look back from the future and ask what's the fundamental good of Tesla. It should be accessed as by who many years did Tesla accelerated the advantage of sustainable energy. The truth is that we, humans, have to have sustainable energy yesterday, not tomorrow. Or our own survival will be at risk.
Estimation of Gas Turbine Shaft Torque and Fuel Flow of a CODLAG Propulsion System Using Genetic Programming Algorithm
Anฤeliฤ, Nikola, ล egota, Sandi Baressi, Lorencin, Ivan, Car, Zlatan
In this paper, the publicly available dataset of condition based maintenance of combined diesel-electric and gas (CODLAG) propulsion system for ships has been utilized to obtain symbolic expressions which could estimate gas turbine shaft torque and fuel flow using genetic programming (GP) algorithm. The entire dataset consists of 11934 samples that was divided into training and testing portions of dataset in an 80:20 ratio. The training dataset used to train the GP algorithm to obtain symbolic expressions for gas turbine shaft torque and fuel flow estimation consisted of 9548 samples. The best symbolic expressions obtained for gas turbine shaft torque and fuel flow estimation were obtained based on their $R^2$ score generated as a result of the application of the testing portion of the dataset on the aforementioned symbolic expressions. The testing portion of the dataset consisted of 2386 samples. The three best symbolic expressions obtained for gas turbine shaft torque estimation generated $R^2$ scores of 0.999201, 0.999296, and 0.999374, respectively. The three best symbolic expressions obtained for fuel flow estimation generated $R^2$ scores of 0.995495, 0.996465, and 0.996487, respectively.
Learning from Experience for Rapid Generation of Local Car Maneuvers
Kicki, Piotr, Gawron, Tomasz, ฤwian, Krzysztof, Ozay, Mete, Skrzypczyลski, Piotr
Being able to rapidly respond to the changing scenes and traffic situations by generating feasible local paths is of pivotal importance for car autonomy. We propose to train a deep neural network (DNN) to plan feasible and nearly-optimal paths for kinematically constrained vehicles in small constant time. Our DNN model is trained using a novel weakly supervised approach and a gradient-based policy search. On real and simulated scenes and a large set of local planning problems, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms the existing planners with respect to the number of successfully completed tasks. While the path generation time is about 40 ms, the generated paths are smooth and comparable to those obtained from conventional path planners.
Online Model Selection: a Rested Bandit Formulation
Cella, Leonardo, Gentile, Claudio, Pontil, Massimiliano
Motivated by a natural problem in online model selection with bandit information, we introduce and analyze a best arm identification problem in the rested bandit setting, wherein arm expected losses decrease with the number of times the arm has been played. The shape of the expected loss functions is similar across arms, and is assumed to be available up to unknown parameters that have to be learned on the fly. We define a novel notion of regret for this problem, where we compare to the policy that always plays the arm having the smallest expected loss at the end of the game. We analyze an arm elimination algorithm whose regret vanishes as the time horizon increases. The actual rate of convergence depends in a detailed way on the postulated functional form of the expected losses. Unlike known model selection efforts in the recent bandit literature, our algorithm exploits the specific structure of the problem to learn the unknown parameters of the expected loss function so as to identify the best arm as quickly as possible. We complement our analysis with a lower bound, indicating strengths and limitations of the proposed solution.
VAE-Info-cGAN: Generating Synthetic Images by Combining Pixel-level and Feature-level Geospatial Conditional Inputs
Xiao, Xuerong, Ganguli, Swetava, Pandey, Vipul
Training robust supervised deep learning models for many geospatial applications of computer vision is difficult due to dearth of class-balanced and diverse training data. Conversely, obtaining enough training data for many applications is financially prohibitive or may be infeasible, especially when the application involves modeling rare or extreme events. Synthetically generating data (and labels) using a generative model that can sample from a target distribution and exploit the multi-scale nature of images can be an inexpensive solution to address scarcity of labeled data. Towards this goal, we present a deep conditional generative model, called VAE-Info-cGAN, that combines a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) with a conditional Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Network (InfoGAN), for synthesizing semantically rich images simultaneously conditioned on a pixel-level condition (PLC) and a macroscopic feature-level condition (FLC). Dimensionally, the PLC can only vary in the channel dimension from the synthesized image and is meant to be a task-specific input. The FLC is modeled as an attribute vector in the latent space of the generated image which controls the contributions of various characteristic attributes germane to the target distribution. An interpretation of the attribute vector to systematically generate synthetic images by varying a chosen binary macroscopic feature is explored. Experiments on a GPS trajectories dataset show that the proposed model can accurately generate various forms of spatio-temporal aggregates across different geographic locations while conditioned only on a raster representation of the road network. The primary intended application of the VAE-Info-cGAN is synthetic data (and label) generation for targeted data augmentation for computer vision-based modeling of problems relevant to geospatial analysis and remote sensing.