This paper addresses several critical stages of designing a walking robot, including optimal structural synthesis, introducing a novel 'rational' mechanical structure aimed at enhancing efficiency and simplifying control system, while addressing practical limitations observed in existing designs. The study includes development of novel multicriteria synthesis methods for achieving optimal leg design, integrating analytical and numerical methods. In addition, a method based on Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II is presented. Turning modes are investigated, and for the first time, the isotropy criterion, typically applied to parallel manipulators, is used for optimizing walking robot parameters to ensure optimal force and motion transfer in all directions. Several physical prototypes are developed to experimentally validate the functionality of different mechanisms of the robot, including adaptation to the surface irregularities and navigation using LiDAR.

Advancements in remote sensing (RS) imagery have provided high-resolution detail and vast coverage, yet existing methods, such as image-level captioning/retrieval and object-level detection/segmentation, often fail to capture mid-scale semantic entities essential for interpreting large-scale scenes. To address this, we propose the conteXtual referring Map (XeMap) task, which focuses on contextual, fine-grained localization of text-referred regions in large-scale RS scenes. Unlike traditional approaches, XeMap enables precise mapping of mid-scale semantic entities that are often overlooked in image-level or object-level methods. To achieve this, we introduce XeMap-Network, a novel architecture designed to handle the complexities of pixel-level cross-modal contextual referring mapping in RS. The network includes a fusion layer that applies self- and cross-attention mechanisms to enhance the interaction between text and image embeddings. Furthermore, we propose a Hierarchical Multi-Scale Semantic Alignment (HMSA) module that aligns multiscale visual features with the text semantic vector, enabling precise multimodal matching across large-scale RS imagery. To support XeMap task, we provide a novel, annotated dataset, XeMap-set, specifically tailored for this task, overcoming the lack of XeMap datasets in RS imagery. XeMap-Network is evaluated in a zero-shot setting against state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating superior performance. This highlights its effectiveness in accurately mapping referring regions and providing valuable insights for interpreting large-scale RS environments.

Autonomous robots must operate in diverse environments and handle multiple tasks despite uncertainties. This creates challenges in designing software architectures and task decision-making algorithms, as different contexts may require distinct task logic and architectural configurations. To address this, robotic systems can be designed as self-adaptive systems capable of adapting their task execution and software architecture at runtime based on their context.This paper introduces ROSA, a novel knowledge-based framework for RObot Self-Adaptation, which enables task-and-architecture co-adaptation (TACA) in robotic systems. ROSA achieves this by providing a knowledge model that captures all application-specific knowledge required for adaptation and by reasoning over this knowledge at runtime to determine when and how adaptation should occur. In addition to a conceptual framework, this work provides an open-source ROS 2-based reference implementation of ROSA and evaluates its feasibility and performance in an underwater robotics application. Experimental results highlight ROSA's advantages in reusability and development effort for designing self-adaptive robotic systems.

Author William R. Forstchen's bestselling novel "One Second After" – which imagines the devastating effects of an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) strike on the United States – is being adapted into a feature film. The screenplay will be written by renowned sci-fi writer J. Michael Straczynski, with Forstchen himself serving as an executive producer. Fox News Digital spoke with Forstchen about the real-world inspiration behind his work and why he warns that an EMP attack is a looming threat, not just science fiction. "I wanted to write an accurate, a very accurate story of what would happen in a small town in North Carolina if the power went off, and it never came back on," he said. Electromagnetic pulse expert William R. Forstchen speaks at the rally against North Korea on San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and Yerba Buena Gardens to support the new Homefront video game on March 2, 2011, in San Francisco, Calif.

Designing concept cars seems kind of like being back in grade school, when kids are encouraged to dream up things like a bedroom with a bouncy-house floor or a spaceship with an ice cream machine on board. At least concept cars have a chance of making it to production at some point, even if that timeline is a long way off. At Kia's EV Day in Barcelona, Spain in March, the brand unveiled a new modular electric van it's calling the Platform Beyond Vehicle (PBV). The PV5 is the first in the automaker's plan, with four variants: Cargo, Passenger, Crew, and a Wheelchair Access Vehicle option. The designers pushed that a little further with the PV5 WKNDR concept, an EV made for camping and overlanding.

Abstract--This study examines the feasibility and profitability of utilizing surplus electricity for Bitcoin mining. Surplus electricity refers to the remaining electricity after net metering, which can be repurposed for Bitcoin mining to improve Korea Electric Power Corporation's (KEPCO) energy resource efficiency and alleviate its debt challenges. Net metering (or net energy metering) is an electricity billing mechanism that allows consumers who generate some or all of their own electricity to use that electricity when they want, rather than when it is produced. Using the latest Bitcoin miner, the Antminer S21 XP Hyd, the study evaluates daily Bitcoin mining when operating at 30,565 and 45,439 units, incorporating Bitcoin network hash rates to assess profitability . T o examine profitability, the Random Forest Regressor and Long Short-T erm Memory models were used to predict the Bitcoin price. The analysis shows that the use of excess electricity for Bitcoin mining not only generates economic revenue, but also minimizes energy loss, reduces debt, and resolves unsettled payment issues for KEPCO. This study empirically investigates and analyzes the integration of electricity surplus in South Korea with bitcoin mining for the first time. The findings highlight the potential to strengthen the financial stability of KEPCO and demonstrate the feasibility of Bitcoin mining. In addition, this research serves as a foundational resource for future advancements in the Bitcoin mining industry and the efficient use of energy resources.

Accurate household electrical energy demand prediction is essential for effectively managing sustainable Energy Communities. Integrated with the Energy Management System, these communities aim to optimise operational costs. However, most existing forecasting models are region-specific and depend on large datasets, limiting their applicability across different climates and geographical areas. These models often lack flexibility and may not perform well in regions with limited historical data, leading to inaccurate predictions. This paper proposes a global model for 24-hour-ahead hourly electrical energy demand prediction that is designed to perform effectively across diverse climate conditions and datasets. The model's efficiency is demonstrated using data from two distinct regions: Ireland, with a maritime climate and Vietnam, with a tropical climate. Remarkably, the model achieves high accuracy even with a limited dataset spanning only nine months. Its robustness is further validated across different seasons in Ireland (summer and winter) and Vietnam (dry and wet). The proposed model is evaluated against state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning methods. Simulation results indicate that the model consistently outperforms benchmark models, showcasing its capability to provide reliable forecasts globally, regardless of varying climatic conditions and data availability. This research underscores the model's potential to enhance the efficiency and sustainability of Energy Communities worldwide. The proposed model achieves a Mean Absolute Percentage Error of 8.0% and 4.0% on the full Irish and Vietnamese datasets.

Recent advances in large language models highlighted the excessive quadratic cost of self-attention. Despite the significant research efforts, subquadratic attention methods still suffer from inferior performance in practice. We hypothesize that dynamic, learned content-based sparsity can lead to more efficient attention mechanisms. We present Mixture of Sparse Attention (MoSA), a novel approach inspired by Mixture of Experts (MoE) with expert choice routing. MoSA dynamically selects tokens for each attention head, allowing arbitrary sparse attention patterns. By selecting $k$ tokens from a sequence of length $T$, MoSA reduces the computational complexity of each attention head from $O(T^2)$ to $O(k^2 + T)$. This enables using more heads within the same computational budget, allowing higher specialization. We show that among the tested sparse attention variants, MoSA is the only one that can outperform the dense baseline, sometimes with up to 27% better perplexity for an identical compute budget. MoSA can also reduce the resource usage compared to dense self-attention. Despite using torch implementation without an optimized kernel, perplexity-matched MoSA models are simultaneously faster in wall-clock time, require less memory for training, and drastically reduce the size of the KV-cache compared to the dense transformer baselines.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become one of the most popular methods for bringing knowledge-intensive context to large language models (LLM) because of its ability to bring local context at inference time without the cost or data leakage risks associated with fine-tuning. A clear separation of private information from the LLM training has made RAG the basis for many enterprise LLM workloads as it allows the company to augment LLM's understanding using customers' private documents. Despite its popularity for private documents in enterprise deployments, current RAG benchmarks for validating and optimizing RAG pipelines draw their corpora from public data such as Wikipedia or generic web pages and offer little to no personal context. Seeking to empower more personal and private RAG we release the EnronQA benchmark, a dataset of 103,638 emails with 528,304 question-answer pairs across 150 different user inboxes. EnronQA enables better benchmarking of RAG pipelines over private data and allows for experimentation on the introduction of personalized retrieval settings over realistic data. Finally, we use EnronQA to explore the tradeoff in memorization and retrieval when reasoning over private documents.

As climate variability increases, the ability of utility providers to deliver precise Estimated Times of Restoration (ETR) during natural disasters has become increasingly critical. Accurate and timely ETRs are essential for enabling customer preparedness during extended power outages, where informed decision-making can be crucial, particularly in severe weather conditions. Nonetheless, prevailing utility practices predominantly depend on manual assessments or traditional statistical methods, which often fail to achieve the level of precision required for reliable and actionable predictions. To address these limitations, we propose a Longitudinal Tabular Transformer (L TT) model that leverages historical outage event data along with sequential updates of these events to improve the accuracy of ETR predictions. The model's performance was evaluated over 34,000 storm-related outage events from three major utility companies, collectively serving over 3 million customers over a 2-year period. Results demonstrate that the L TT model improves the Customer Satisfaction Impact (CSI) metric by an average of 19.08% (p >0.001) compared to existing methods. Additionally, we introduce customer-informed regression metrics that align model evaluation with real-world satisfaction, ensuring the outcomes resonate with customer expectations. Furthermore, we employ interpretability techniques to analyze the temporal significance of incorporating sequential updates in modeling outage events and to identify the contributions of predictive features to a given ETR. This comprehensive approach not only improves predictive accuracy but also enhances transparency, fostering greater trust in the model's capabilities.