We demonstrate an algorithm for learning a flexible color-magnitude diagram from noisy parallax and photometry measurements using a normalizing flow, a deep neural network capable of learning an arbitrary multi-dimensional probability distribution. We present a catalog of 640M photometric distance posteriors to nearby stars derived from this data-driven model using Gaia DR2 photometry and parallaxes. Dust estimation and dereddening is done iteratively inside the model and without prior distance information, using the Bayestar map. The signal-to-noise (precision) of distance measurements improves on average by more than 48% over the raw Gaia data, and we also demonstrate how the accuracy of distances have improved over other models, especially in the noisy-parallax regime. Applications are discussed, including significantly improved Milky Way disk separation and substructure detection. We conclude with a discussion of future work, which exploits the normalizing flow architecture to allow us to exactly marginalize over missing photometry, enabling the inclusion of many surveys without losing coverage.

The notion of cyber-physical systems (CPS) describes the co mbination of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and software (the "cyber" part) with physical compone nts. A CPS can emerge from embedded systems by internetworking them. The first big research program focusi ng on CPS has been started by the US National Science Foundation in 2006, where the term CPS is defined in as such tha t it "refers to the tight conjoining of and coordination between computational and physical resources," stating "[ w]e envision that the cyber-physical systems of tomorrow will far exceed those of today in terms of adaptability, auto nomy, efficiency, functionality, reliability, safety, and usability" [1]. While the notion of CPS by the U.S. National Science Foundati on, as outlined above, includes ICT, it does not explicitly name Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a necessary component to raise an embedded system to the status of a CPS. Y et, the availability of sensory data together with a co mmunications system and the ability to exert actions upon the physical world that have been planned for the whole compo und of embedded systems components readily suggests that issues of planning, the increase of reflectivity, effici ency, and lowering resource usage is achieved by increasing the "intelligence" of the overall system. As such, research ers in the domain of AI have found numerous application domains. However, the two worlds of CPS and AI usually operate on diffe rent terms: CPS require operation within well-defined boundaries, i.e., as far as possible deterministic behavio r within well-known, strictly enforced margins of error. In contrast, many AI techniques--Artificial Neural Networks (A NNs) foremost--are firmly rooted in the domain of statistics, which is probably very well seen in the ANN train ing process.

Cutting-edge robots are on display at the 2019 World Robot Conference in Beijing, running from August 20 to 25, are expected to attract nearly 200 guests from 22 countries. The conference features a series of exhibition areas for new robotic technologies and products - including medical, multi-legged, and smart logistics - as well as four contests with an anticipated 4,500 professional participants. Over 700 robots specialising with more than 21 industrial applications will be exhibited between now and the close of the conference. Among those exhibiting will be HRG Robotics, whose, president Wang Meng, said: 'We will be showcasing a string of successful companies which have got off the ground through the help of HRG, alongside our representative products at WRC 2019, as we aim to form new partnerships with companies around the world.' Also on display will be SmartBird, created by German firm Festo, whose design was inspired by the herring gull and whose flight mimics that of the bird. The ultralight flying drone was created with the best aerodynamics and maximum agility in mind and it is able to take off, fly and land under its own power.

The United States Geological Survey confirmed with the Center for Data Innovation over email on July 22, 2019, that "1-meter DEMs are available or in progress for 45% of the country."

Interference effects of tall buildings have attracted numerous studies due to the boom of clusters of tall buildings in megacities. To fully understand the interference effects of buildings, it often requires a substantial amount of wind tunnel tests. Limited wind tunnel tests that only cover part of interference scenarios are unable to fully reveal the interference effects. This study used machine learning techniques to resolve the conflicting requirement between limited wind tunnel tests that produce unreliable results and a completed investigation of the interference effects that is costly and time-consuming. Four machine learning models including decision tree, random forest, XGBoost, generative adversarial networks (GANs), were trained based on 30% of a dataset to predict both mean and fluctuating pressure coefficients on the principal building. The GANs model exhibited the best performance in predicting these pressure coefficients. A number of GANs models were then trained based on different portions of the dataset ranging from 10% to 90%. It was found that the GANs model based on 30% of the dataset is capable of predicting both mean and fluctuating pressure coefficients under unseen interference conditions accurately. By using this GANs model, 70% of the wind tunnel test cases can be saved, largely alleviating the cost of this kind of wind tunnel testing study.

With developing of computation tools in the last years, data analysis methods to find insightful information are becoming more common among industries and researchers. This paper is the first part of the times series analysis of New England electricity price and demand to find anomaly in the data. In this paper time-series stationary criteria to prepare data for further times-series related analysis is investigated. Three main analysis are conducted in this paper, including moving average, moving standard deviation and augmented Dickey-Fuller test. The data used in this paper is New England big data from 9 different operational zones. For each zone, 4 different variables including day-ahead (DA) electricity demand, price and real-time (RT) electricity demand price are considered.

The system also acts as a giant feedback-response or learning loop which learns from the data collected via user/system interactions.

We start with a brief introduction to reinforcement learning (RL), about its successful stories, basics, an example, issues, the ICML 2019 Workshop on RL for Real Life, how to use it, study material and an outlook. Then we discuss a selection of RL applications, including recommender systems, computer systems, energy, finance, healthcare, robotics, and transportation.

Recent applications of machine learning algorithms in the seismic domain have shown great potential in different areas such as seismic inversion and interpretation. However, such algorithms rarely enforce geophysical constraints - the lack of which might lead to undesirable results. To overcome this issue, we have developed a semi-supervised sequence modeling framework based on recurrent neural networks for elastic impedance inversion from multi-angle seismic data. Specifically, seismic traces and elastic impedance (EI) traces are modeled as a time series. Then, a neural-network-based inversion model comprising convolutional and recurrent neural layers is used to invert seismic data for EI. The proposed workflow uses well-log data to guide the inversion. In addition, it uses seismic forward modeling to regularize the training and to serve as a geophysical constraint for the inversion. The proposed workflow achieves an average correlation of 98% between the estimated and target EI using 10 well logs for training on a synthetic data set.

The world sees a proliferation of machine learning/deep learning (ML) models and their wide adoption in different application domains recently. This has made the profiling and characterization of ML models an increasingly pressing task for both hardware designers and system providers, as they would like to offer the best possible computing system to serve ML models with the desired latency, throughput, and energy requirements while maximizing resource utilization. Such an endeavor is challenging as the characteristics of an ML model depend on the interplay between the model, framework, system libraries, and the hardware (or the HW/SW stack). A thorough characterization requires understanding the behavior of the model execution across the HW/SW stack levels. Existing profiling tools are disjoint, however, and only focus on profiling within a particular level of the stack. This paper proposes a leveled profiling design that leverages existing profiling tools to perform across-stack profiling. The design does so in spite of the profiling overheads incurred from the profiling providers. We coupled the profiling capability with an automatic analysis pipeline to systematically characterize 65 state-of-the-art ML models. Through this characterization, we show that our across-stack profiling solution provides insights (which are difficult to discern otherwise) on the characteristics of ML models, ML frameworks, and GPU hardware.