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New automated machine learning capabilities in Azure Machine Learning service Blog Microsoft Azure

#artificialintelligence

This will enable more people in your organization to leverage machine learning and most importantly allow domain experts to rapidly prototype ML solutions and validate their hypothesis before involving data scientists. If you are an experienced data scientist, automated ML will let you improve productivity and save time by eliminating the need to manually perform the tedious and repetitive tasks of feature engineering, algorithm selection and hyperparameter tuning. You can even start by generating a model with automated ML as a starting point and tune it further. Organizations can also use automated ML to benchmark their models. Many Fortune 500 customers are benefiting from using automated ML. These include a global oil & refinery enterprise that's using automated ML to forecast reservoir production and a medical devices company that's using automated ML for predictive maintenance. Automated ML also powers Microsoft Power BI's AI capabilities, where business analysts can build machine learning models without writing a single line of code. Azure Machine Learning service's automated ML capability is based on a breakthrough from our Microsoft Research division and different from competing solutions in the market. The approach combines ideas from collaborative filtering and Bayesian optimization to search an enormous space of possible machine learning pipelines intelligently and efficiently.


Dual 8-bit breakthroughs bring AI to the edge

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This week, at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), IBM researchers will showcase new hardware that will take AI further than it's been before: right to the edge. Our novel approaches for digital and analog AI chips boost speed and slash energy demand for deep learning, without sacrificing accuracy. On the digital side, we're setting the stage for a new industry standard in AI training with an approach that achieves full accuracy with eight-bit precision, accelerating training time by two to four times over today's systems. On the analog side, we report eight-bit precision--the highest yet--for an analog chip, roughly doubling accuracy compared with previous analog chips while consuming 33x less energy than a digital architecture of similar precision. These achievements herald a new era of computing hardware designed to unleash the full potential of AI.


A Hybrid Long-Term Load Forecasting Model for Distribution Feeder Peak Demand using LSTM Neural Network

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network is an enhanced Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that has gained significant attention in recent years. It solved the vanishing and exploding gradient problems that a standard RNN has and was successfully applied to a variety of time-series forecasting problems. In power systems, distribution feeder long-term load forecast is a critical task many electric utility companies perform on an annual basis. The goal of this task is to forecast the load change on existing distribution feeders for the next few years. The forecasted results will be used as input in long-term system planning studies to determine necessary system upgrades so that the distribution system can continue to operate reliably during normal operation and contingences. This research proposed a comprehensive hybrid model based on LSTM neural network for this classic and important forecasting task. It is not only able to combine the advantages of top-down and bottom-up forecasting models but also able to leverage the time-series characteristics of multi-year data. This paper firstly explains the concept of LSTM neural network and then discusses the steps of feature selection, feature engineering and model establishment in detail. In the end, a real-world application example for a large urban grid in West Canada is provided. The results are compared to other models such as bottom-up, ARIMA and ANN. The proposed model demonstrates superior performance and great practicality for forecasting long-term peak demand for distribution feeders.


Zero Initialization of modified Gated Recurrent Encoder-Decoder Network for Short Term Load Forecasting

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Single layer Feedforward Neural Network(FNN) is used many a time as a last layer in models such as seq2seq or could be a simple RNN network. The importance of such layer is to transform the output to our required dimensions. When it comes to weights and biases initialization, there is no such specific technique that could speed up the learning process. We could depend on deep network initialization techniques such as Xavier or He initialization. But such initialization fails to show much improvement in learning speed or accuracy. In this paper we propose Zero Initialization (ZI) for weights of a single layer network. We first test this technique with on a simple RNN network and compare the results against Xavier, He and Identity initialization. As a final test we implement it on a seq2seq network. It was found that ZI considerably reduces the number of epochs used and improve the accuracy. The developed model has been applied for short-term load forecasting using the load data of Australian Energy Market. The model is able to forecast the day ahead load accurately with error of 0.94%.


Machine Learning of coarse-grained Molecular Dynamics Force Fields

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Atomistic or ab-initio molecular dynamics simulations are widely used to predict thermodynamics and kinetics and relate them to molecular structure. A common approach to go beyond the time- and lengthscales accessible with such computationally expensive simulations is the definition of coarse-grained molecular models. Existing coarse-graining approaches define an effective interaction potential to match defined properties of high-resolution models or experimental data. In this paper we reformulate coarse-graining as a supervised machine learning problem. We use statistical learning theory to decompose the coarse-graining error and cross-validation to select to compare the performance of different models. We introduce CGnets, a deep learning approach, that learn coarse-grained free energy functions and can be trained by the force matching scheme. CGnets maintain all physically relevant invariances and allow to incorporate prior physics knowledge to avoid sampling of unphysical structures. We demonstrate that CGnets outperform the results of classical coarse-graining methods, as they are able to capture the multi-body terms that emerge from the dimensionality reduction.


When Bifidelity Meets CoKriging: An Efficient Physics-Informed Multifidelity Method

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Specifically, the two types of multifidelity methods we use are the bifidelity and CoKriging methods. Thenew approach uses the bifidelity method to efficiently estimate the empirical mean and covariance of the stochastic simulation outputs, then it uses these statistics to construct a Gaussian process (GP) representing low-fidelity in CoKriging. We also combine the bifidelity method with Kriging, where the approximated empirical statistics are used to construct the GP as well. We prove that the resulting posterior mean by the new physics-informed approach preserves linear physical constraints up to an error bound. By using this method, we can obtain an accurate construction of a state of interest based on a partially correct physical model and a few accurate observations. We present numerical examples to demonstrate performance of the method. Keywords: physics-informed, Gaussian process regression, CoKriging, multifidelity, bifidelity, error bound.


NASA reveals new images of its InSight lander preparing for work

Daily Mail - Science & tech

The robot will go through an initial assessment phase to check on its overall health and the health of its instruments before it can move on to the deployment phase. Then, once its finally time to deploy its suite of instruments, that process alone is expected to take two to three months. InSight will place its seismometer, and only once the team is happy with its location and initial operations will it return to the deck to get its wind and thermal shields, which will sit atop the seismometer for protection. The lander will then pick up the heat probe to bring to the surface, before beginning its historic dig. Eventually, once it's all settled in, Barrett says we'll be'sitting back listening for Mars quakes.'


Assigning a Grade: Accurate Measurement of Road Quality Using Satellite Imagery

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Roads are critically important infrastructure to societal and economic development, with huge investments made by governments every year. However, methods for monitoring those investments tend to be time-consuming, laborious, and expensive, placing them out of reach for many developing regions. In this work, we develop a model for monitoring the quality of road infrastructure using satellite imagery. For this task, we harness two trends: the increasing availability of high-resolution, often-updated satellite imagery, and the enormous improvement in speed and accuracy of convolutional neural network-based methods for performing computer vision tasks. We employ a unique dataset of road quality information on 7000km of roads in Kenya combined with 50cm resolution satellite imagery. We create models for a binary classification task as well as a comprehensive 5-category classification task, with accuracy scores of 88 and 73 percent respectively. We also provide evidence of the robustness of our methods with challenging held-out scenarios, though we note some improvement is still required for confident analysis of a never before seen road. We believe these results are well-positioned to have substantial impact on a broad set of transport applications.


Unsupervised learning and data clustering for the construction of Galaxy Catalogs in the Dark Energy Survey

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Large scale astronomical surveys continue to increase their depth and scale, providing new opportunities to observe large numbers of celestial objects with ever increasing precision. At the same time, the sheer scale of ongoing and future surveys pose formidable challenges to classify astronomical objects. Pioneering efforts on this front include the citizen science approach adopted by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). These SDSS datasets have been used recently to train neural network models to classify galaxies in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) that overlap the footprint of both surveys. While this represents a significant step to classify unlabeled images of astrophysical objects in DES, the key issue at heart still remains, i.e., the classification of unlabelled DES galaxies that have not been observed in previous surveys. To start addressing this timely and pressing matter, we demonstrate that knowledge from deep learning algorithms trained with real-object images can be transferred to classify elliptical and spiral galaxies that overlap both SDSS and DES surveys, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy 99.6%. More importantly, to initiate the characterization of unlabelled DES galaxies that have not been observed in previous surveys, we demonstrate that our neural network model can also be used for unsupervised clustering, grouping together unlabeled DES galaxies into spiral and elliptical types. We showcase the application of this novel approach by classifying over ten thousand unlabelled DES galaxies into spiral and elliptical classes. We conclude by showing that unsupervised clustering can be combined with recursive training to start creating large-scale DES galaxy catalogs in preparation for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope era.


AI's contributions in oil, gas to hit $2.85b by 2020

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The UAE Minister of State for Artificial Intelligence Omar Sultan Al Olama said technologies are reshaping the energy scene globally. "Technology is going to change the impact of output and return in the energy scene globally. The factors are data, artificial intelligence and Internet of Things to name a few as well as block chain and other emerging technologies," Al Olama said at Adipec. "Through Artificial Intelligence, all sectors are changing. Any process that is algorithmic is being disrupted by this technology. And this disruption is retuning higher yields, increasing efficiency and improving safety and security. We can use data to drive faster and accurate decisions."