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2025 Climate Tech Companies to Watch: Cemvision and its low-emissions cement

MIT Technology Review

The startup is using waste materials and alternative fuels to make cement, slashing greenhouse gas emissions in a polluting industry. Cement is one of the most used materials on the planet, and the industry emits billions of tons of greenhouse gasses annually. Cemvision wants to use waste materials and alternative fuels to help reduce climate pollution from cement production. Today, making cement requires crushing limestone and heating it to super high temperatures, usually by burning fossil fuels. The chemical reactions also release carbon dioxide pollution. Swedish startup Cemvision made a few key production changes to reduce both emissions and the need to mine new materials.


How we picked promising climate tech companies in an especially unsettling year

MIT Technology Review

And what distinguishes the firms that made the 2025 edition of our annual list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch. 's reporters and editors faced a dilemma as we began to mull nominees for this year's list of Climate Tech Companies to Watch. How do you pick companies poised to succeed in a moment of such deep uncertainty, at a time when the new Trump administration is downplaying the dangers of climate change, unraveling supportive policies for clean technologies, and enacting tariffs that will boost costs and disrupt supply chains for numerous industries? We as a publication are focused more on identifying companies developing technologies that can address the escalating threats of climate change, than on businesses positioned purely for market success. But we still don't want to lead our readers astray by highlighting a startup that winds up filing for bankruptcy six months later, even if its demise is due to a policy whiplash outside of its control. So we had to shift our thinking some.


Orthogonal Procrustes problem preserves correlations in synthetic data

arXiv.org Machine Learning

This work introduces the application of the Orthogonal Procrustes problem to the generation of synthetic data. The proposed methodology ensures that the resulting synthetic data preserves important statistical relationships among features, specifically the Pearson correlation. An empirical illustration using a large, real-world, tabular dataset of energy consumption demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach and highlights its potential for application in practical synthetic data generation. Our approach is not meant to replace existing generative models, but rather as a lightweight post-processing step that enforces exact Pearson correlation to an already generated synthetic dataset.


YOLO-Based Defect Detection for Metal Sheets

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this paper, we propose a YOLO-based deep learning (DL) model for automatic defect detection to solve the time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks in industrial manufacturing. In our experiments, the images of metal sheets are used as the dataset for training the YOLO model to detect the defects on the surfaces and in the holes of metal sheets. However, the lack of metal sheet images significantly degrades the performance of detection accuracy. To address this issue, the ConSinGAN is used to generate a considerable amount of data. Four versions of the YOLO model (i.e., YOLOv3, v4, v7, and v9) are combined with the ConSinGAN for data augmentation. The proposed YOLOv9 model with ConSinGAN outperforms the other YOLO models with an accuracy of 91.3%, and a detection time of 146 ms. The proposed YOLOv9 model is integrated into manufacturing hardware and a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to establish a practical automated optical inspection (AOI) system. Additionally, the proposed automated defect detection is easily applied to other components in industrial manufacturing.


Joint Bidding on Intraday and Frequency Containment Reserve Markets

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As renewable energy integration increases supply variability, battery energy storage systems (BESS) present a viable solution for balancing supply and demand. This paper proposes a novel approach for optimizing battery BESS participation in multiple electricity markets. We develop a joint bidding strategy that combines participation in the primary frequency reserve market with continuous trading in the intraday market, addressing a gap in the extant literature which typically considers these markets in isolation or simplifies the continuous nature of intraday trading. Our approach utilizes a mixed integer linear programming implementation of the rolling intrinsic algorithm for intraday decisions and state of charge recovery, alongside a learned classifier strategy (LCS) that determines optimal capacity allocation between markets. A comprehensive out-of-sample backtest over more than one year of historical German market data validates our approach: The LCS increases overall profits by over 4% compared to the best-performing static strategy and by more than 3% over a naive dynamic benchmark. Crucially, our method closes the gap to a theoretical perfect foresight strategy to just 4%, demonstrating the effectiveness of dynamic, learning-based allocation in a complex, multi-market environment.


Optimal Smooth Coverage Trajectory Planning for Quadrotors in Cluttered Environment

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, with the rapid development of manufacturing industries, unmanned systems have found widespread applications across various fields. Among them, quadro-tors have been increasingly utilized in industrial applications such as aerial photography and surveying [1]. As electricity consumption continues to rise, the frequency of power grid maintenance has also increased. Given the high risks and costs associated with manual inspections, the importance of utilizing unmanned systems for autonomous power grid inspections has become increasingly evident [2], as shown in Fig 1. Substations, as critical components of the power grid system, play an essential role in ensuring seamless inspection across modules within the same facility or between different facilities. The units scheduled for inspection can be abstracted as a series of access points, with drones acting as agents tasked with visiting these points.


EditLens: Quantifying the Extent of AI Editing in Text

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A significant proportion of queries to large language models ask them to edit user-provided text, rather than generate new text from scratch. While previous work focuses on detecting fully AI-generated text, we demonstrate that AI-edited text is distinguishable from human-written and AI-generated text. First, we propose using lightweight similarity metrics to quantify the magnitude of AI editing present in a text given the original human-written text and validate these metrics with human annotators. Using these similarity metrics as intermediate supervision, we then train EditLens, a regression model that predicts the amount of AI editing present within a text. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both binary (F1=94.7%) and ternary (F1=90.4%) classification tasks in distinguishing human, AI, and mixed writing. Not only do we show that AI-edited text can be detected, but also that the degree of change made by AI to human writing can be detected, which has implications for authorship attribution, education, and policy. Finally, as a case study, we use our model to analyze the effects of AI-edits applied by Grammarly, a popular writing assistance tool. To encourage further research, we commit to publicly releasing our models and dataset.


A Dimension-Decomposed Learning Framework for Online Disturbance Identification in Quadrotor SE(3) Control

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Quadrotor stability under complex dynamic disturbances and model uncertainties poses significant challenges. One of them remains the underfitting problem in high-dimensional features, which limits the identification capability of current learning-based methods. To address this, we introduce a new perspective: Dimension-Decomposed Learning (DiD-L), from which we develop the Sliced Adaptive-Neuro Mapping (SANM) approach for geometric control. Specifically, the high-dimensional mapping for identification is axially ``sliced" into multiple low-dimensional submappings (``slices"). In this way, the complex high-dimensional problem is decomposed into a set of simple low-dimensional tasks addressed by shallow neural networks and adaptive laws. These neural networks and adaptive laws are updated online via Lyapunov-based adaptation without any pre-training or persistent excitation (PE) condition. To enhance the interpretability of the proposed approach, we prove that the full-state closed-loop system exhibits arbitrarily close to exponential stability despite multi-dimensional time-varying disturbances and model uncertainties. This result is novel as it demonstrates exponential convergence without requiring pre-training for unknown disturbances and specific knowledge of the model.


Bayesian E(3)-Equivariant Interatomic Potential with Iterative Restratification of Many-body Message Passing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning potentials (MLPs) have become essential for large-scale atomistic simulations, enabling ab initio-level accuracy with computational efficiency. However, current MLPs struggle with uncertainty quantification, limiting their reliability for active learning, calibration, and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. We address these challenges by developing Bayesian E(3) equivariant MLPs with iterative restratification of many-body message passing. Our approach introduces the joint energy-force negative log-likelihood (NLL$_\text{JEF}$) loss function, which explicitly models uncertainty in both energies and interatomic forces, yielding superior accuracy compared to conventional NLL losses. We systematically benchmark multiple Bayesian approaches, including deep ensembles with mean-variance estimation, stochastic weight averaging Gaussian, improved variational online Newton, and laplace approximation by evaluating their performance on uncertainty prediction, OOD detection, calibration, and active learning tasks. We further demonstrate that NLL$_\text{JEF}$ facilitates efficient active learning by quantifying energy and force uncertainties. Using Bayesian active learning by disagreement (BALD), our framework outperforms random sampling and energy-uncertainty-based sampling. Our results demonstrate that Bayesian MLPs achieve competitive accuracy with state-of-the-art models while enabling uncertainty-guided active learning, OOD detection, and energy/forces calibration. This work establishes Bayesian equivariant neural networks as a powerful framework for developing uncertainty-aware MLPs for atomistic simulations at scale.


From high-frequency sensors to noon reports: Using transfer learning for shaft power prediction in maritime

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With the growth of global maritime transportation, energy optimization has become crucial for reducing costs and ensuring operational efficiency. Shaft power is the mechanical power transmitted from the engine to the shaft and directly impacts fuel consumption, making its accurate prediction a paramount step in optimizing vessel performance. Power consumption is highly correlated with ship parameters such as speed and shaft rotation per minute, as well as weather and sea conditions. Frequent access to this operational data can improve prediction accuracy. However, obtaining high-quality sensor data is often infeasible and costly, making alternative sources such as noon reports a viable option. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning-based approach for predicting vessels' shaft power, where a model is initially trained on high-frequency data from a vessel and then fine-tuned with low-frequency daily noon reports from other vessels. We tested our approach on sister vessels (identical dimensions and configurations), a similar vessel (slightly larger with a different engine), and a different vessel (distinct dimensions and configurations). The experiments showed that the mean absolute percentage error decreased by 10.6% for sister vessels, 3.6% for a similar vessel, and 5.3% for a different vessel, compared to the model trained solely on noon report data. Keywords: transfer learning, shaft power prediction, noon reports, sensor data, maritime.