On May 7th, WattTime announced a new project in collaboration with Carbon Tracker, Google, and the World Resources Institute (WRI). The project will quantify carbon emissions from all of the world's largest power plants by utilizing AI technology. Data collected will be made available in a public database. The data is intended to hold the polluting plants accountable to environmental standards and enable advanced new emissions reduction technologies. But through the growing power of AI, our little coalition of nonprofits is about to lift that veil all over the world, all at once," said Gavin McCormick, Executive Director of WattTime. "To think that today a little team like ours can use emerging AI remote sensing techniques to hold every powerful polluter worldwide accountable is pretty incredible.

The planet is in jeopardy. Humans are both causing and contending with deforestation, ocean acidification, and climbing temperatures, to name a few of our less-than-benign legacies. The facts are complex but the trends aren't easily disputed. And yet, the topic of global peril is an ire-raising one these days, liable as not to put a reader into a defensive crouch. Perhaps it's because we're thrummed over the head with the worst of it all and rarely allowed to revel in solutions.

Drone attacks claimed by Yemen's Houthi rebels struck two key oil installations inside Saudi Arabia on Saturday, damaging facilities that process the vast majority of the country's crude output and raising the risk of a disruption in world oil supplies. The attacks immediately escalated tensions in the Persian Gulf amid a standoff between the United States and Iran, even as key questions remained unanswered -- where the drones were launched from, and how the Houthis managed to hit facilities deep in Saudi territory, some 500 miles from Yemeni soil. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Iran of being behind what he called "an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply" and asserted that there was "no evidence the attacks came from Yemen." He did not, however, specify an alternative launch site, and the Saudis themselves refrained from pointing the finger directly at Iran. President Trump condemned the attack in a phone call with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and offered support for "Saudi Arabia's self defense," the White House said in a statement, adding that the United States "remains committed to ensuring global oil markets are stable and well supplied."

In recent years, a myriad of advanced results have been reported in the community of imitation learning, ranging from parametric to non-parametric, probabilistic to non-probabilistic and Bayesian to frequentist approaches. Meanwhile, ample applications (e.g., grasping tasks and human-robot collaborations) further show the applicability of imitation learning in a wide range of domains. While numerous literature is dedicated to the learning of human skills in unconstrained environment, the problem of learning constrained motor skills, however, has not received equal attention yet. In fact, constrained skills exist widely in robotic systems. For instance, when a robot is demanded to write letters on a board, its end-effector trajectory must comply with the plane constraint from the board. In this paper, we aim to tackle the problem of imitation learning with linear constraints. Specifically, we propose to exploit the probabilistic properties of multiple demonstrations, and subsequently incorporate them into a linearly constrained optimization problem, which finally leads to a non-parametric solution. In addition, a connection between our framework and the classical model predictive control is provided. Several examples including simulated writing and locomotion tasks are presented to show the effectiveness of our framework.

The attack comes after Iran exceeded their enriched uranium stockpile limit in the nuclear deal. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called on the international community to join him Saturday in condemning Iran for drone attacks on two Saudi oil facilities, which he described as "an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply." "Tehran is behind nearly 100 attacks on Saudi Arabia while [President Hassan] Rouhani and [Foreign Minister Mohammad] Zarif pretend to engage in diplomacy," Pompeo tweeted, referring to the nation's president and foreign affairs minister. There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen." Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack hours before Pompeo's tweet. The world's largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia and a major oil field were impacted, sparking huge fires at a vulnerable chokepoint for global energy supplies. "The United States will work with our partners and allies to ensure that energy markets remain well supplied and Iran is held accountable for its aggression," Pompeo concluded. According to multiple news reports that cited unidentified sources, the drone attacks affected up to half of the supplies from the world's largest exporter of oil, though the output should be restored within days. It remained unclear if anyone was injured at the Abqaiq oil processing facility and the Khurais oil field. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, denounced Pompeo's description of the attack, calling it an "irresponsible simplification." "The Saudis and Houthis are at war.

Saudi authorities attempt to control a fire at an Aramco factory. The world's largest oil processing facility and a nearby oil field in Saudi Arabia were set ablaze early Saturday morning after reported drone attacks by Iranian-backed Yemeni rebels. The Interior Ministry was quoted by state-run media as saying the fires at the Abqaiq oil processing facility in Buqyaq and the nearby Khurais oil field operated by Saudi Aramco were "targeted by drones." It wasn't immediately clear if there were any injuries, nor what effect it would have on oil production in the kingdom. Smoke is seen following a fire at Aramco facility in the eastern city of Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia, September 14, 2019.

H3 Dynamics has partnered with Curitiba-based EPH Engineering in Brazil, a firm that specializes in hydropower design, dam inspections and safety plans, to launch a turnkey dam inspection solution that combines AI-enabled damage assessment and HYCOPTER fuel cell drones capable of flying 3.5 hours at a time. With over 5,000 dams submitted to the Brazilian Dam Safety Plan, and two recent collapse incidents causing more than 300 deaths and major environmental damage, Brazilian authorities have tightened inspection and upkeep requirements in the country. "Many accident reports show that problems were not detected by instrumentation but by visual observation. Drones can help, but due to the large dimensions of these structures we need much longer flight times." Some of the dams are so large that they would require months of battery-powered drone flights to fully scan their surfaces.

PointGrab is an Israel based business that offers a platform which includes an image sensing a cloud and hardware unit management program called CogniPoint, which they say might help building maintenance managers reduce operational costs by using AI to automate as well as enhance facility management. PointGrab claims computer users can integrate the CogniPoint formula of theirs into current building automation systems. Furthermore the Cognipoint sensor is actually installed to certain rooms in the structure to monitor the amount of occupants. The sensor could be hooked up to the buildings' present local area network (LAN), Power over Ethernet (POE) or perhaps WiFi connections. The company claims each of the sensor products of theirs are able to cover up to forty eight square meters (or maybe 520 sq ft).

I've created more ML models for disambiguating key petroleum systems concepts in text. These are needed when creating algorithms to parse text to detect patterns and extract entities to improve search (Information Retrieval), Visual Analytics or populate a KnowledgeGraph. For example, 'migration' (migrates, migrated, migrating) to go with the'source' (as in source rock) model... Continue Reading

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – Drones attacked the world's largest oil processing facility in Saudi Arabia and a major oil field operated by Saudi Aramco early Saturday, the kingdom's Interior Ministry said, sparking a huge fire at a processor crucial to global energy supplies. No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks in Buqyaq and the Khurais oil field, though Yemen's Houthi rebels previously launched drone assaults deep inside of the kingdom. It wasn't clear if there were any injuries in the attacks, nor what effect it would have on oil production in the kingdom. The attack also likely will heighten tensions further across the wider Persian Gulf amid a confrontation between the U.S. and Iran over its unraveling nuclear deal with world powers. Online videos apparently shot in Buqyaq included the sound of gunfire in the background.