Reinforcement learning (RL) agents are powerful tools for managing power grids. They use large amounts of data to inform their actions and receive rewards or penalties as feedback to learn favorable responses for the system. Once trained, these agents can efficiently make decisions that would be too computationally complex for a human operator. This ability is especially valuable in decarbonizing power networks, where the demand for RL agents is increasing. These agents are well suited to control grid actions since the action space is constantly growing due to uncertainties in renewable generation, microgrid integration, and cybersecurity threats. To assess the efficacy of RL agents in response to an adverse grid event, we use the Grid2Op platform for agent training. We employ a proximal policy optimization (PPO) algorithm in conjunction with graph neural networks (GNNs). By simulating agents' responses to grid events, we assess their performance in avoiding grid failure for as long as possible. The performance of an agent is expressed concisely through its reward function, which helps the agent learn the most optimal ways to reconfigure a grid's topology amidst certain events. To model multi-actor scenarios that threaten modern power networks, particularly those resulting from cyberattacks, we integrate an opponent that acts iteratively against a given agent. This interplay between the RL agent and opponent is utilized in N-k contingency screening, providing a novel alternative to the traditional security assessment.

Event cameras capture sparse, asynchronous brightness changes which offer high temporal resolution, high dynamic range, low power consumption, and sparse data output. These advantages make them ideal for Space Situational Awareness, particularly in detecting resident space objects moving within a telescope's field of view. However, the output from event cameras often includes substantial background activity noise, which is known to be more prevalent in low-light conditions. This noise can overwhelm the sparse events generated by satellite signals, making detection and tracking more challenging. Existing noise-filtering algorithms struggle in these scenarios because they are typically designed for denser scenes, where losing some signal is acceptable. This limitation hinders the application of event cameras in complex, real-world environments where signals are extremely sparse. In this paper, we propose new event-driven noise-filtering algorithms specifically designed for very sparse scenes. We categorise the algorithms into logical-based and learning-based approaches and benchmark their performance against 11 state-of-the-art noise-filtering algorithms, evaluating how effectively they remove noise and hot pixels while preserving the signal. Their performance was quantified by measuring signal retention and noise removal accuracy, with results reported using ROC curves across the parameter space. Additionally, we introduce a new high-resolution satellite dataset with ground truth from a real-world platform under various noise conditions, which we have made publicly available. Code, dataset, and trained weights are available at \url{https://github.com/samiarja/dvs_sparse_filter}.

Donald Trump said on Saturday that Chris Wright, an oil and gas industry executive and a staunch defender of fossil fuel use, would be his pick to lead the US Department of Energy. Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, an oilfield services firm based in Denver, Colorado. He is expected to support Trump's plan to maximize production of oil and gas and to seek ways to boost generation of electricity, demand for which is rising for the first time in decades. He is also likely to share Trump's opposition to global cooperation on fighting climate change. Wright has called climate change activists alarmist and has likened efforts by Democrats to combat global warming to Soviet-style communism.

In perhaps the most adorable hacker story of the year, a trio of technologists in India found an innovative way to circumvent Apple's location restrictions on AirPod Pro 2s so they could enable the earbuds' hearing aid feature for their grandmas. The hack involved a homemade Faraday cage, a microwave, and a lot of trial and error. On the other end of the tech-advancements spectrum, the US military is currently testing an AI-enabled machine gun that is capable of auto-targeting swarms of drones. The Bullfrog, built by Allen Control Systems, is one of several advanced weapons technologies in the works to combat the growing threat of cheap, small drones on the battlefield. The US Department of Justice announced this week that an 18-year-old from California has admitted to making or orchestrating more than 375 swatting attacks across the United States.

EXCLUSIVE - Author and filmmaker Justine Bateman expressed optimism for the country following President-elect Donald Trump's historic victory, saying it felt like a cloud had been lifted. I feel great, in fact," Bateman told Fox News Digital in an interview. "I feel like there was this kind of suffocating cloud that was kind of over us… Regular people who had questions about decisions that were being made were threatened subtly or obviously into silence. And I feel like that's been broken, that sort of suppression has been kind of broken." Bateman, best known for playing Mallory Keaton on the hit 1980s sitcom "Family Ties," recently went viral for referring to the last four years as being "a very un-American period" for free expression and that only "permitted positions" were accepted by the powers that be. "My belief is that everyone should be free to live their life exactly how they want to live it.

This paper presents a framework for developing efficient and interpretable carbon-cycle emulators (CCEs) as part of climate emulators in Integrated Assessment Models, enabling economists to custom-build CCEs accurately calibrated to advanced climate science. We propose a generalized multi-reservoir linear box-model CCE that preserves key physical quantities and can be use-case tailored for specific use cases. Three CCEs are presented for illustration: the 3SR model (replicating DICE-2016), the 4PR model (including the land biosphere), and the 4PR-X model (accounting for dynamic land-use changes like deforestation that impact the reservoir's storage capacity). Evaluation of these models within the DICE framework shows that land-use changes in the 4PR-X model significantly impact atmospheric carbon and temperatures -- emphasizing the importance of using tailored climate emulators. By providing a transparent and flexible tool for policy analysis, our framework allows economists to assess the economic impacts of climate policies more accurately.

Modern industrial infrastructures rely heavily on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), but these are vulnerable to cyber-attacks with potentially catastrophic effects. To reduce these risks, anomaly detection methods based on physical invariants have been developed. However, these methods often require domain-specific expertise to manually define invariants, making them costly and difficult to scale. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach to extract physical invariants from CPS testbeds for anomaly detection. Our insight is that CPS design documentation often contains semantically rich descriptions of physical procedures, which can profile inter-correlated dynamics among system components. Leveraging the built-in physics and engineering knowledge of recent generative AI models, we aim to automate this traditionally manual process, improving scalability and reducing costs. This work focuses on designing and optimizing a Retrieval-Augmented-Generation (RAG) workflow with a customized prompting system tailored for CPS documentation, enabling accurate extraction of semantic information and inference of physical invariants from complex, multimodal content. Then, rather than directly applying the inferred invariants for anomaly detection, we introduce an innovative statistics-based learning approach that integrates these invariants into the training dataset. This method addresses limitations such as hallucination and concept drift, enhancing the reliability of the model. We evaluate our approach on real-world public CPS security dataset which contains 86 data points and 58 attacking cases. The results show that our approach achieves a high precision of 0.923, accurately detecting anomalies while minimizing false alarms.

In prior research, we analyzed the backwards swimming motion of mosquito larvae, parameterized it, and replicated it in a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model. Since the parameterized swimming motion is copied from observed larvae, it is not necessarily the most efficient locomotion for the model of the swimmer. In this project, we further optimize this copied solution for the swimmer model. We utilize Reinforcement Learning to guide local parameter updates. Since the majority of the computation cost arises from the CFD model, we additionally train a deep learning model to replicate the forces acting on the swimmer model. We find that this method is effective at performing local search to improve the parameterized swimming locomotion.

In recent years, Cyber attacks have increased in number, and with them, the intensity of the attacks and their potential to damage the user have also increased significantly. In an ever-advancing world, users find it difficult to keep up with the latest developments in technology, which can leave them vulnerable to attacks. To avoid such situations we need tools to deter such attacks, for this machine learning models are among the best options. This paper presents a Browser Extension that uses machine learning models to enhance online security by integrating three crucial functionalities: Malicious URL detection, Spam Email detection and Network logs analysis. The proposed solution uses LGBM classifier for classification of Phishing websites, the model has been trained on a dataset with 87 features, this model achieved an accuracy of 96.5% with a precision of 96.8% and F1 score of 96.49%. The Model for Spam email detection uses Multinomial NB algorithm which has been trained on a dataset with over 5500 messages, this model achieved an accuracy of 97.09% with a precision of 100%. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of using machine learning models for cyber security.

Nearly 6.7 million lives are lost due to air pollution every year. While policymakers are working on the mitigation strategies, public awareness can help reduce the exposure to air pollution. Air pollution data from government-installed sensors is often publicly available in raw format, but there is a non-trivial barrier for various stakeholders in deriving meaningful insights from that data. In this work, we present VayuBuddy, a Large Language Model (LLM)-powered chatbot system to reduce the barrier between the stakeholders and air quality sensor data. VayuBuddy receives the questions in natural language, analyses the structured sensory data with a LLM-generated Python code and provides answers in natural language. We use the data from Indian government air quality sensors. We benchmark the capabilities of 7 LLMs on 45 diverse question-answer pairs prepared by us. Additionally, VayuBuddy can also generate visual analysis such as line-plots, map plot, bar charts and many others from the sensory data as we demonstrate in this work.