If a major disaster like Fukushima or Chornobyl ever happens again, the world would know almost straight away, thanks to an array of government and DIY radiation-monitoring programs running globally. Why Don't Norwegians Hate Tesla Like the Rest of Europe Does? November's Tesla registrations were down in France, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany. Norway, however, is bucking the trend--thanks to a tax incentive system that will soon be rolled back.

West Somerset Lagoon would harness renewable energy for UK's AI boom - and create'iconic' arc around Bristol Channel The architect of the London Eye wants to build a vast tidal power station in a 14-mile arc off the coast of Somerset that could help Britain meet surging electricity demand to power artificial intelligence - and create a new race track to let cyclists skim over the Bristol Channel. Julia Barfield, who designed the Eye and the i360 observation tower in Brighton, is part of a team that has drawn up the £11bn proposal. The proposal comes amid growing concern that rapidly rising use of AI in Britain will drive up carbon emissions unless more renewable energy sources are found. The AI boom is expected to add to sharp increases in demand for electricity across the UK, which the government estimated this month could more than double by 2050. "If the decision is to go ahead with adopting more and more AI - which I am surprised is not being questioned more at a time of climate emergency - then it is going to be better with a renewable energy source," said Barfield.

As extreme weather events become more frequent, understanding their impact on human health becomes increasingly crucial. However, the utilization of Earth Observation to effectively analyze the environmental context in relation to health remains limited. This limitation is primarily due to the lack of fine-grained spatial and temporal data in public and population health studies, hindering a comprehensive understanding of health outcomes. Additionally, obtaining appropriate environmental indices across different geographical levels and timeframes poses a challenge. For the years 2019 (pre-COVID) and 2020 (COVID), we collected spatio-temporal indicators for all Lower Layer Super Output Areas in England. These indicators included: i) 111 sociodemographic features linked to health in existing literature, ii) 43 environmental point features (e.g., greenery and air pollution levels), iii) 4 seasonal composite satellite images each with 11 bands, and iv) prescription prevalence associated with five medical conditions (depression, anxiety, diabetes, hypertension, and asthma), opioids and total prescriptions. We combined these indicators into a single MedSat dataset, the availability of which presents an opportunity for the machine learning community to develop new techniques specific to public health. These techniques would address challenges such as handling large and complex data volumes, performing effective feature engineering on environmental and sociodemographic factors, capturing spatial and temporal dependencies in the models, addressing imbalanced data distributions, developing novel computer vision methods for health modeling based on satellite imagery, ensuring model explainability, and achieving generalization beyond the specific geographical region.

The lack of standardized benchmarks for reinforcement learning (RL) in sustainability applications has made it difficult to both track progress on specific domains and identify bottlenecks for researchers to focus their efforts. In this paper, we present SustainGym, a suite of five environments designed to test the performance of RL algorithms on realistic sustainable energy system tasks, ranging from electric vehicle charging to carbon-aware data center job scheduling. The environments test RL algorithms under realistic distribution shifts as well as in multi-agent settings. We show that standard off-the-shelf RL algorithms leave significant room for improving performance and highlight the challenges ahead for introducing RL to real-world sustainability tasks.

We introduce IMP-MARL, an open-source suite of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) environments for large-scale Infrastructure Management Planning (IMP), offering a platform for benchmarking the scalability of cooperative MARL methods in real-world engineering applications.In IMP, a multi-component engineering system is subject to a risk of failure due to its components' damage condition.Specifically, each agent plans inspections and repairs for a specific system component, aiming to minimise maintenance costs while cooperating to minimise system failure risk.With IMP-MARL, we release several environments including one related to offshore wind structural systems, in an effort to meet today's needs to improve management strategies to support sustainable and reliable energy systems.Supported by IMP practical engineering environments featuring up to 100 agents, we conduct a benchmark campaign, where the scalability and performance of state-of-the-art cooperative MARL methods are compared against expert-based heuristic policies. The results reveal that centralised training with decentralised execution methods scale better with the number of agents than fully centralised or decentralised RL approaches, while also outperforming expert-based heuristic policies in most IMP environments.Based on our findings, we additionally outline remaining cooperation and scalability challenges that future MARL methods should still address.Through IMP-MARL, we encourage the implementation of new environments and the further development of MARL methods.

This year, hype around AI really exploded, and so did concerns about AI's environmental footprint. We also saw some surprising biotech developments. It's been a busy and productive year here at . We published magazine issues on power, creativity, innovation, bodies, relationships, and security . We hosted 14 exclusive virtual conversations with our editors and outside experts in our subscriber-only series, Roundtables, and held two events on MIT's campus. And we published hundreds of articles online, following new developments in computing, climate tech, robotics, and more.

As societal awareness of climate change grows, corporate climate policy engagements are attracting attention.We propose a dataset to estimate corporate climate policy engagement from various PDF-formatted documents.Our dataset comes from LobbyMap (a platform operated by global think tank InfluenceMap) that provides engagement categories and stances on the documents.To convert the LobbyMap data into the structured dataset, we developed a pipeline using text extraction and OCR.Our contributions are: (i) Building an NLP dataset including 10K documents on corporate climate policy engagement.

For joint inference over multiple variables, a variety of structured prediction techniques have been developed to model correlations among variables and thereby improve predictions. However, many classical approaches suffer from one of two primary drawbacks: they either lack the ability to model high-order correlations among variables while maintaining computationally tractable inference, or they do not allow to explicitly model known correlations. To address this shortcoming, we introduce'Graph Structured Prediction Energy Networks,' for which we develop inference techniques that allow to both model explicit local and implicit higher-order correlations while maintaining tractability of inference. We apply the proposed method to tasks from the natural language processing and computer vision domain and demonstrate its general utility.

In structured output prediction tasks, labeling ground-truth training output is often expensive. However, for many tasks, even when the true output is unknown, we can evaluate predictions using a scalar reward function, which may be easily assembled from human knowledge or non-differentiable pipelines. But searching through the entire output space to find the best output with respect to this reward function is typically intractable. In this paper, we instead use efficient truncated randomized search in this reward function to train structured prediction energy networks (SPENs), which provide efficient test-time inference using gradient-based search on a smooth, learned representation of the score landscape, and have previously yielded state-of-the-art results in structured prediction. In particular, this truncated randomized search in the reward function yields previously unknown local improvements, providing effective supervision to SPENs, avoiding their traditional need for labeled training data.

Wind energy resource quantification, air pollution monitoring, and weather forecasting all rely on rapid, accurate measurement of local wind conditions. Visual observations of the effects of wind---the swaying of trees and flapping of flags, for example---encode information regarding local wind conditions that can potentially be leveraged for visual anemometry that is inexpensive and ubiquitous. Here, we demonstrate a coupled convolutional neural network and recurrent neural network architecture that extracts the wind speed encoded in visually recorded flow-structure interactions of a flag and tree in naturally occurring wind. Predictions for wind speeds ranging from 0.75-11 m/s showed agreement with measurements from a cup anemometer on site, with a root-mean-squared error approaching the natural wind speed variability due to atmospheric turbulence. Generalizability of the network was demonstrated by successful prediction of wind speed based on recordings of other flags in the field and in a controlled wind tunnel test. Furthermore, physics-based scaling of the flapping dynamics accurately predicts the dependence of the network performance on the video frame rate and duration.