Numerical methods such as finite element have been flourishing in the past decades for modeling solid mechanics problems via solving governing partial differential equations (PDEs). A salient aspect that distinguishes these numerical methods is how they approximate the physical fields of interest. Physics-informed deep learning is a novel approach recently developed for modeling PDE solutions and shows promise to solve computational mechanics problems without using any labeled data. The philosophy behind it is to approximate the quantity of interest (e.g., PDE solution variables) by a deep neural network (DNN) and embed the physical law to regularize the network. To this end, training the network is equivalent to minimization of a well-designed loss function that contains the PDE residuals and initial/boundary conditions (I/BCs). In this paper, we present a physics-informed neural network (PINN) with mixed-variable output to model elastodynamics problems without resort to labeled data, in which the I/BCs are hardly imposed. In particular, both the displacement and stress components are taken as the DNN output, inspired by the hybrid finite element analysis, which largely improves the accuracy and trainability of the network. Since the conventional PINN framework augments all the residual loss components in a "soft" manner with Lagrange multipliers, the weakly imposed I/BCs cannot not be well satisfied especially when complex I/BCs are present. To overcome this issue, a composite scheme of DNNs is established based on multiple single DNNs such that the I/BCs can be satisfied forcibly in a "hard" manner. The propose PINN framework is demonstrated on several numerical elasticity examples with different I/BCs, including both static and dynamic problems as well as wave propagation in truncated domains. Results show the promise of PINN in the context of computational mechanics applications.

We create a computationally tractable algorithm for contextual bandits with continuous actions having unknown structure. Our reduction-style algorithm composes with most supervised learning representations. We prove that it works in a general sense and verify the new functionality with large-scale experiments.

The number of Earth observation satellites carrying optical sensors with similar characteristics is constantly growing. Despite their similarities and the potential synergies among them, derived satellite products are often developed for each sensor independently. Differences in retrieved radiances lead to significant drops in accuracy, which hampers knowledge and information sharing across sensors. This is particularly harmful for machine learning algorithms, since gathering new ground truth data to train models for each sensor is costly and requires experienced manpower. In this work, we propose a domain adaptation transformation to reduce the statistical differences between images of two satellite sensors in order to boost the performance of transfer learning models. The proposed methodology is based on the Cycle Consistent Generative Adversarial Domain Adaptation (CyCADA) framework that trains the transformation model in an unpaired manner. In particular, Landsat-8 and Proba-V satellites, which present different but compatible spatio-spectral characteristics, are used to illustrate the method. The obtained transformation significantly reduces differences between the image datasets while preserving the spatial and spectral information of adapted images, which is hence useful for any general purpose cross-sensor application. In addition, the training of the proposed adversarial domain adaptation model can be modified to improve the performance in a specific remote sensing application, such as cloud detection, by including a dedicated term in the cost function. Results show that, when the proposed transformation is applied, cloud detection models trained in Landsat-8 data increase cloud detection accuracy in Proba-V.

In this paper, we present a new reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm called Distributional Soft Actor Critic (DSAC), which exploits the distributional information of accumulated rewards to achieve better performance. Seamlessly integrating SAC (which uses entropy to encourage exploration) with a principled distributional view of the underlying objective, DSAC takes into consideration the randomness in both action and rewards, and beats the state-of-the-art baselines in several continuous control benchmarks. Moreover, with the distributional information of rewards, we propose a unified framework for risk-sensitive learning, one that goes beyond maximizing only expected accumulated rewards. Under this framework we discuss three specific risk-related metrics: percentile, mean-variance and distorted expectation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that with distribution modeling in RL, the agent performs better for both risk-averse and risk-seeking control tasks.

Modern cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as our energy infrastructure, are becoming increasingly complex: An ever-higher share of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based technologies use the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) facet of energy systems for operation optimization, cost efficiency, and to reach CO2 goals worldwide. At the same time, markets with increased flexibility and ever shorter trade horizons enable the multi-stakeholder situation that is emerging in this setting. These systems still form critical infrastructures that need to perform with highest reliability. However, today's CPS are becoming too complex to be analyzed in the traditional monolithic approach, where each domain, e.g., power grid and ICT as well as the energy market, are considered as separate entities while ignoring dependencies and side-effects. To achieve an overall analysis, we introduce the concept for an application of distributed artificial intelligence as a self-adaptive analysis tool that is able to analyze the dependencies between domains in CPS by attacking them. It eschews pre-configured domain knowledge, instead exploring the CPS domains for emergent risk situations and exploitable loopholes in codices, with a focus on rational market actors that exploit the system while still following the market rules.

The implementation of efficient demand response (DR) programs for household electricity consumption would benefit from data-driven methods capable of simulating the impact of different tariffs schemes. This paper proposes a novel method based on conditional variational autoencoders (CVAE) to generate, from an electricity tariff profile combined with exogenous weather and calendar variables, daily consumption profiles of consumers segmented in different clusters. First, a large set of consumers is gathered into clusters according to their consumption behavior and price-responsiveness. The clustering method is based on a causality model that measures the effect of a specific tariff on the consumption level. Then, daily electrical energy consumption profiles are generated for each cluster with CVAE. This non-parametric approach is compared to a semi-parametric data generator based on generalized additive models and that uses prior knowledge of energy consumption. Experiments in a publicly available data set show that, the proposed method presents comparable performance to the semi-parametric one when it comes to generating the average value of the original data. The main contribution from this new method is the capacity to reproduce rebound and side effects in the generated consumption profiles. Indeed, the application of a special electricity tariff over a time window may also affect consumption outside this time window. Another contribution is that the clustering approach segments consumers according to their daily consumption profile and elasticity to tariff changes. These two results combined are very relevant for an ex-ante testing of future DR policies by system operators, retailers and energy regulators.

While executives, already working through digital transformation, grapple with pandemic-related recovery issues, they're leaning on technologies--both proven and innovative--to stay on track. Most leaders see artificial intelligence as crucial and describe a "sense of urgency at the top" to implement it. Yet, they struggle to integrate company-wide AI initiatives. Seventy-five percent of executives surveyed believe that if they fail to do so, their companies will be gone in five years. AI in the business world will likely grow at a steady pace over the next five years, then shoot skyward.

Climate change is seen as the biggest challenge to the future of human life on Earth, and understanding the scientific language used to describe it can sometimes feel just as difficult. But help is at hand. Use our translator tool to find out what some of the words and phrases relating to climate change mean. Keeping the rise in global average temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius will avoid the worst impacts of climate change, scientists say.

In this work, we present a method for obtaining an implicit objective function for vision-based navigation. The proposed methodology relies on Imitation Learning, Model Predictive Control (MPC), and Deep Learning. We use Imitation Learning as a means to do Inverse Reinforcement Learning in order to create an approximate costmap generator for a visual navigation challenge. The resulting costmap is used in conjunction with a Model Predictive Controller for real-time control and outperforms other state-of-the-art costmap generators combined with MPC in novel environments. The proposed process allows for simple training and robustness to out-of-sample data. We apply our method to the task of vision-based autonomous driving in multiple real and simulated environments using the same weights for the costmap predictor in all environments.

The performance of learning-based control techniques crucially depends on how effectively the system is explored. While most exploration techniques aim to achieve a globally accurate model, such approaches are generally unsuited for systems with unbounded state spaces. Furthermore, a globally accurate model is not required to achieve good performance in many common control applications, e.g., local stabilization tasks. In this paper, we propose an active learning strategy for Gaussian process state space models that aims to obtain an accurate model on a bounded subset of the state-action space. Our approach aims to maximize the mutual information of the exploration trajectories with respect to a discretization of the region of interest. By employing model predictive control, the proposed technique integrates information collected during exploration and adaptively improves its exploration strategy. To enable computational tractability, we decouple the choice of most informative data points from the model predictive control optimization step. This yields two optimization problems that can be solved in parallel. We apply the proposed method to explore the state space of various dynamical systems and compare our approach to a commonly used entropy-based exploration strategy. In all experiments, our method yields a better model within the region of interest than the entropy-based method.