Artificial intelligence (AI) is present in our lives in many areas, from phones where we can easily access almost any information anywhere in the world to supermarkets where we can shop with a'click'; from banks where we can easily process transactions online to social platforms where we spend most of our time. But, can artificial intelligence make a positive contribution to understanding the problems caused by climate change too, problems gradually turning into a crisis? In fact, AI can help climate researchers find solutions in many areas such as air pollution. An example of this is IBM's Green Horizon Project, which predicts pollution by analyzing environmental data and testing what will happen if pollution is reduced. Likewise, Google has reduced the energy its data centers use by around 15% by employing data from machine learning algorithms.

This paper presents an eXplainable Fault Detection and Diagnosis System (XFDDS) for incipient faults in PV panels. The XFDDS is a hybrid approach that combines the model-based and data-driven framework. Model-based FDD for PV panels lacks high fidelity models at low irradiance conditions for detecting incipient faults. To overcome this, a novel irradiance based three diode model (IB3DM) is proposed. It is a nine parameter model that provides higher accuracy even at low irradiance conditions, an important aspect for detecting incipient faults from noise. To exploit PV data, extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) is used due to its ability to detecting incipient faults. Lack of explainability, feature variability for sample instances, and false alarms are challenges with data-driven FDD methods. These shortcomings are overcome by hybridization of XGBoost and IB3DM, and using eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques. To combine the XGBoost and IB3DM, a fault-signature metric is proposed that helps reducing false alarms and also trigger an explanation on detecting incipient faults. To provide explainability, an eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) application is developed. It uses the local interpretable model-agnostic explanations (LIME) framework and provides explanations on classifier outputs for data instances. These explanations help field engineers/technicians for performing troubleshooting and maintenance operations. The proposed XFDDS is illustrated using experiments on different PV technologies and our results demonstrate the perceived benefits.

We advance the modeling capability of electron particle precipitation from the magnetosphere to the ionosphere through a new database and use of machine learning tools to gain utility from those data. We have compiled, curated, analyzed, and made available a new and more capable database of particle precipitation data that includes 51 satellite years of Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) observations temporally aligned with solar wind and geomagnetic activity data. The new total electron energy flux particle precipitation nowcast model, a neural network called PrecipNet, takes advantage of increased expressive power afforded by machine learning approaches to appropriately utilize diverse information from the solar wind and geomagnetic activity and, importantly, their time histories. With a more capable representation of the organizing parameters and the target electron energy flux observations, PrecipNet achieves a >50% reduction in errors from a current state-of-the-art model (OVATION Prime), better captures the dynamic changes of the auroral flux, and provides evidence that it can capably reconstruct mesoscale phenomena. We create and apply a new framework for space weather model evaluation that culminates previous guidance from across the solar-terrestrial research community. The research approach and results are representative of the `new frontier' of space weather research at the intersection of traditional and data science-driven discovery and provides a foundation for future efforts.

A solar-powered autonomous drone scans for forest fires. A surgeon first operates on a digital heart before she picks up a scalpel. A global community bands together to print personal protection equipment to fight a pandemic. "The future is now," says Frédéric Vacher, head of innovation at Dassault Systèmes. And all of this is possible with cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and a virtual 3D design shop, or as Dassault calls it, the 3DEXPERIENCE innovation lab. This open innovation laboratory embraces the concept of the social enterprise and merges collective intelligence with a cross-collaborative approach by building what Vacher calls "communities of people--passionate and willing to work together to accomplish a common objective." This podcast episode was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not produced by MIT Technology Review's editorial staff. "It's not only software, it's not only cloud, but it's also a community of people's skills and services available for the marketplace," Vacher says. "Now, because technologies are more accessible, newcomers can also disrupt, and this is where we want to focus with the lab." And for Dassault Systèmes, there's unlimited real-world opportunities with the power of collective intelligence, especially when you are bringing together industry experts, health-care professionals, makers, and scientists to tackle covid-19. Vacher explains, "We created an open community, 'Open Covid-19,' to welcome any volunteer makers, engineers, and designers to help, because we saw at that time that many people were trying to do things but on their own, in their lab, in their country."

Windfall Geotek (formerly Albert Mining) is a Canadian corporation offering a proven and industry-leading digital platform leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies to significantly improve outcomes in the exploration, development, operations and financing of geologically focused projects. Principal markets encompass the global resource mining industry including virtually all forms of mineralization including oil and gas exploration. Recent advances have led to the detection of water sources and aquifers especially in drought regions, and of anti-personnel landmines and related deadly legacy hazards in conflict zones. Our applied machine learning technology offers a revolutionary approach to geologic discovery and a markedly positive economic impact on operational efficiencies. Since 2004 our Company has added value to over 30 client discoveries and more than 80 target generation projects around the globe.

While the scope of reinforcement learning (RL) is likely to soon extend far beyond computer simulation, today the main location for training RL agents is within the digital environment. In the world of artificial intelligence, simulators are often the environments in which an algorithm functions. For humans, we are born directly into our simulator and it requires no effort on our part to go on functioning. We call this simulator the universe and it exists whether we believe in it or not. Similarly, the laws of physics apply whether you acknowledge them or not. They require no effort or acquiescence on our part.

An artificial intelligence technique--machine learning--is helping accelerate the development of highly tunable materials known as metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that have important applications in chemical separations, adsorption, catalysis, and sensing. Utilizing data about the properties of more than 200 existing MOFs, the machine learning platform was trained to help guide the development of new materials by predicting an often-essential property: water stability. Using guidance from the model, researchers can avoid the time-consuming task of synthesizing and then experimentally testing new candidate MOFs for their aqueous stability. Already, researchers are expanding the model to predict other important MOF properties. Supported by the Office of Science's Basic Energy Sciences program within the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the research was reported Nov. 9 in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. The research was conducted in the Center for Understanding and Control of Acid Gas-Induced Evolution of Materials for Energy (UNCAGE-ME), a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center located at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Estimation models from connected vehicles often assume low level parameters such as arrival rates and market penetration rates as known or estimate them in real-time. At low market penetration rates, such parameter estimators produce large errors making estimated queue lengths inefficient for control or operations applications. In order to improve accuracy of low level parameter estimations, this study investigates the impact of connected vehicles information filtering on queue length estimation models. Filters are used as multilevel real-time estimators. Accuracy is tested against known arrival rate and market penetration rate scenarios using microsimulations. To understand the effectiveness for short-term or for dynamic processes, arrival rates, and market penetration rates are changed every 15 minutes. The results show that with Kalman and Particle filters, parameter estimators are able to find the true values within 15 minutes and meet and surpass the accuracy of known parameter scenarios especially for low market penetration rates. In addition, using last known estimated queue lengths when no connected vehicle is present performs better than inputting average estimated values. Moreover, the study shows that both filtering algorithms are suitable for real-time applications that require less than 0.1 second computational time.

We demonstrate that deep learning techniques can be used to predict motility induced phase separation (MIPS) in suspensions of active Brownian particles (ABPs) by creating a notion of phase at the particle level. Using a fully connected network in conjunction with a graph neural network we use individual particle features to predict to which phase a particle belongs. From this, we are able to compute the fraction of dilute particles to determine if the system is in the homogeneous dilute, dense, or coexistence region. Our predictions are compared against the MIPS binodal computed from simulation. The strong agreement between the two suggests that machine learning provides an effective way to determine the phase behavior of ABPs and could prove useful for determining more complex phase diagrams.

Indoor autonomous navigation requires a precise and accurate localization system able to guide robots through cluttered, unstructured and dynamic environments. Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology, as an indoor positioning system, offers precise localization and tracking, but moving obstacles and non-line-of-sight occurrences can generate noisy and unreliable signals. That, combined with sensors noise, unmodeled dynamics and environment changes can result in a failure of the guidance algorithm of the robot. We demonstrate how a power-efficient and low computational cost point-to-point local planner, learnt with deep reinforcement learning (RL), combined with UWB localization technology can constitute a robust and resilient to noise short-range guidance system complete solution. We trained the RL agent on a simulated environment that encapsulates the robot dynamics and task constraints and then, we tested the learnt point-to-point navigation policies in a real setting with more than two-hundred experimental evaluations using UWB localization. Our results show that the computational efficient end-to-end policy learnt in plain simulation, that directly maps low-range sensors signals to robot controls, deployed in combination with ultra-wideband noisy localization in a real environment, can provide a robust, scalable and at-the-edge low-cost navigation system solution.