Housebound by a pandemic, humanity slowed its emissions of greenhouse gases in 2020. But Earth paid little heed: Temperatures last year tied the modern record, climate scientists reported last week. Overall, the planet was about 1.25°C warmer than in preindustrial times, a trend that puts climate targets in jeopardy, according to jointly reported assessments from NASA, Berkeley Earth, the U.K. Met Office, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The annual update of global surface temperatures—an average of readings from thousands of weather stations and ocean probes—shows 2020 essentially tied records set in 2016. But the years were nothing alike. Temperatures in 2016 were boosted by a strong El Niño, a weather pattern that warms the globe by blocking the rise of cold deep waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean. Last year, however, the Pacific entered La Niña, which has a cooling effect. That La Niña didn't provide more relief is an unwelcome surprise, says Nerilie Abram, a climate scientist at Australian National University. “It makes me worried about how quickly the global warming trend is growing.” The past 6 years are the six warmest on record, but the warming of the atmosphere is unsteady because of its chaotic nature. The ocean, which absorbs more than 90% of the heat from global warming, displays a steadier trend, and here, too, 2020 was a record year. The upper levels of the ocean contained 20 zettajoules (1021 joules) more heat than in 2019, and the rise was double the typical annual increase, scientists reported last week in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences . The subtropical Atlantic Ocean was particularly hot, fueling a record outbreak of hurricanes, says Lijing Cheng, a climate scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences's Institute of Atmospheric Physics who led the work. This heat, monitored down to 2000 meters by a fleet of 4000 robotic probes, is spreading deeper into the ocean while also migrating toward the poles. An extreme heat wave struck the northern Pacific, killing marine life. For the first time, warm Atlantic waters were seen penetrating into the Arctic Ocean, melting sea ice from below and reducing its extent nearly to a record low ( Science , 28 August 2020, p. [1043][1]). The warming ocean and melting ice sheets are raising sea levels by 4.8 millimeters per year, and the rate is accelerating ( Science , 20 November 2020, p. [901][2]). On land, 2020 was even more relentless, with temperatures rising 1.96°C above preindustrial levels, a clear record, Berkeley Earth reported. It was the warmest year ever in Asia and Europe and tied for the warmest in South America. Russia was particularly hot, breaking its previous record by 1.2°C, while swaths of Siberia were 7°C warmer than in preindustrial times, leading to large-scale fires and thawing permafrost that caused buildings to founder and set off oil spills ( Science , 7 August 2020, p. [612][3]). “Siberia was crazy,” says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at the Breakthrough Institute and co-author of the Berkeley Earth analysis. “That heat would effectively be impossible without the warming we've seen.” In Australia, record-setting heat and drought fueled catastrophic bushfires at the start of 2020. Fires torched nearly one-quarter of southeastern Australia's forests and destroyed 3000 homes. Climate change was to blame for the country's “Black Summer,” Abram and co-authors concluded in a study published this month in Communications Earth & Environment . Meanwhile, in the United States, unprecedented heat came to the desert Southwest, which is already warming faster than the rest of the country. Phoenix wilted under its hottest summer ever, averaging 36°C. Arizona's Maricopa county, home to Phoenix, is a leader in addressing heat exposure, yet its heat deaths have hit a new record each year since 2016. In 2020, the number approached 300, a jump of some 50% over the previous year, says David Hondula, a climatologist who studies heat mortality at Arizona State University, Tempe. “It was just off the charts in terms of heat.” ![Figure][4] Turning up the heatCREDITS: (GRAPHIC) N. DESAI/ SCIENCE ; (DATA) MET OFFICE; NASA; BERKELEY EARTH; NOAA Although the global economic slowdown of the COVID-19 pandemic cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by some 7%, atmospheric CO2 is long-lived, and warming from previous emissions is preordained. In any case, the drop in emissions is unlikely to last. Later this year, in May, before photosynthesis in the Northern Hemisphere draws down CO2, the U.K. Met Office predicts that levels of atmospheric CO2 will pass 417 parts per million for several weeks, 50% higher than preindustrial levels. Only dramatic action by the world's countries, far beyond existing efforts, can begin to halt this build up, Cheng says. Should the current rate of warming continue, the world will breach the targets set in the Paris climate agreement—limiting warming to 1.5°C or 2°C—by 2035 and 2065, respectively. But Hausfather says it's quite possible that warming, which has largely held steady for the past few decades at 0.19°C per decade, will actually speed up. The rate of warming over the past 14 years is well above the long-term trend. The debate now, he says, is whether that is an omen of an even darker future. [1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/369/6507/1043.full [2]: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/370/6519/901.full [3]: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/369/6504/612.full [4]: pending:yes

However, most companies don't have the resources to implement sophisticated AI programs to stay secure and advance digital capabilities on their own. Irrespective of size, available budget, and in-house personnel, all energy companies must manage operations and security fundamentals to ensure they have visibility and monitoring across powerful digital tools to remain resilient and competitive. The achievement of that goal is much more likely in partnership with the right experts. MIT Technology Review Insights, in association with Siemens Energy, spoke to more than a dozen information technology (IT) and cybersecurity executives at oil and gas companies worldwide to gain insight about how AI is affecting their digital transformation and cybersecurity strategies in oil and gas operating environments. Energy sector organizations are presented with a major opportunity to deploy AI and build out a data strategy that optimizes production and uncovers new business models, as well as secure operational technology. Oil and gas companies are faced with unprecedented uncertainty--depressed oil and gas prices due to the coronavirus pandemic, a multiyear glut in the market, and the drive to go green--and many are making a rapid transition to digitalization as a matter of survival.

In a low-rise building overlooking a busy intersection in Beijing, Ji Rong Wen, a middle-aged scientist with thin-rimmed glasses and a mop of black hair, excitedly describes a project that could advance one of the hottest areas of artificial intelligence. Wen leads a team at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), a government-sponsored research lab that's testing a powerful new language algorithm--something similar to GPT-3, a program revealed in June by researchers at OpenAI that digests large amounts of text and can generate remarkably coherent, free-flowing language. "This is a big project," Wen says with a big grin. "It takes a lot of computing infrastructure and money." Wen, a professor at Renmin University in Beijing recruited to work part-time at BAAI, hopes to create an algorithm that is even cleverer than GPT-3. He plans to combine machine learning with databases of facts, and to feed the algorithm images and video as well as text, in hope of creating a richer understanding of the physical world--that the words cat and fur don't just often appear in the same sentence, but are associated with one another visually.

The mission of AI100 is to launch a study every five years, over the course of a century, to better track and anticipate how artificial intelligence propagates through society, and how it shapes different aspects of our lives. This IJCAI session brought together some of the people involved in the AI100 initiative to discuss their efforts and the direction of the project. The goals of the AI100 are "to support a longitudinal study of AI advances on people and society, centering on periodic studies of developments, trends, futures, and potential disruptions associated with the developments in machine intelligence, and formulating assessments, recommendations and guidance on proactive efforts". Working on the AI100 project are a standing committee and a study panel. The first study panel report, released in 2016, can be read in full here.

A universal fault-tolerant quantum computer that can solve efficiently problems such as integer factorization and unstructured database search requires millions of qubits with low error rates and long coherence times. While the experimental advancement towards realizing such devices will potentially take decades of research, noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers already exist. These computers are composed of hundreds of noisy qubits, i.e. qubits that are not error-corrected, and therefore perform imperfect operations in a limited coherence time. In the search for quantum advantage with these devices, algorithms have been proposed for applications in various disciplines spanning physics, machine learning, quantum chemistry and combinatorial optimization. The goal of such algorithms is to leverage the limited available resources to perform classically challenging tasks. In this review, we provide a thorough summary of NISQ computational paradigms and algorithms. We discuss the key structure of these algorithms, their limitations, and advantages. We additionally provide a comprehensive overview of various benchmarking and software tools useful for programming and testing NISQ devices.

For a d-ary Boolean function Φ: {0, 1}d → {0, 1} and an assignment to its variables x = (x1, x2, . . . , xd) we consider the problem of finding those subsets of the variables that are sufficient to determine the function value with a given probability δ. This is motivated by the task of interpreting predictions of binary classifiers described as Boolean circuits, which can be seen as special cases of neural networks. We show that the problem of deciding whether such subsets of relevant variables of limited size k ≤ d exist is complete for the complexity class NPPP and thus, generally, unfeasible to solve. We then introduce a variant, in which it suffices to check whether a subset determines the function value with probability at least δ or at most δ − γ for 0 < γ < δ. This promise of a probability gap reduces the complexity to the class NPBPP. Finally, we show that finding the minimal set of relevant variables cannot be reasonably approximated, i.e. with an approximation factor d1−α for α > 0, by a polynomial time algorithm unless P = NP. This holds even with the promise of a probability gap.

In general-purpose particle detectors, the particle flow algorithm may be used to reconstruct a coherent particle-level view of the event by combining information from the calorimeters and the trackers, significantly improving the detector resolution for jets and the missing transverse momentum. In view of the planned high-luminosity upgrade of the CERN Large Hadron Collider, it is necessary to revisit existing reconstruction algorithms and ensure that both the physics and computational performance are sufficient in a high-pileup environment. Recent developments in machine learning may offer a prospect for efficient event reconstruction based on parametric models. We introduce MLPF, an end-to-end trainable machine-learned particle flow algorithm for reconstructing particle flow candidates based on parallelizable, computationally efficient, scalable graph neural networks and a multi-task objective. We report the physics and computational performance of the MLPF algorithm on on a synthetic dataset of ttbar events in HL-LHC running conditions, including the simulation of multiple interaction effects, and discuss potential next steps and considerations towards ML-based reconstruction in a general purpose particle detector.

This thesis is a proof of concept for the potential of Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) on representation learning of real-world Knowledge Graphs (KG). Inspired by successful approaches to the generation of molecular graphs, we evaluate the capabilities of our model, the Relational Graph Variational Auto-Encoder (RGVAE). The impact of the modular hyperparameter choices, encoding through graph convolutions, graph matching and latent space prior, is compared. The RGVAE is first evaluated on link prediction. The mean reciprocal rank (MRR) scores on the two datasets FB15K-237 and WN18RR are compared to the embedding-based model DistMult. A variational DistMult and a RGVAE without latent space prior constraint are implemented as control models. The results show that between different settings, the RGVAE with relaxed latent space, scores highest on both datasets, yet does not outperform the DistMult. Further, we investigate the latent space in a twofold experiment: first, linear interpolation between the latent representation of two triples, then the exploration of each latent dimension in a $95\%$ confidence interval. Both interpolations show that the RGVAE learns to reconstruct the adjacency matrix but fails to disentangle. For the last experiment we introduce a new validation method for the FB15K-237 data set. The relation type-constrains of generated triples are filtered and matched with entity types. The observed rate of valid generated triples is insignificantly higher than the random threshold. All generated and valid triples are unseen. A comparison between different latent space priors, using the $\delta$-VAE method, reveals a decoder collapse. Finally we analyze the limiting factors of our approach compared to molecule generation and propose solutions for the decoder collapse and successful representation learning of multi-relational KGs.

Deep learning models are susceptible to adversarial examples that have imperceptible perturbations in the original input, resulting in adversarial attacks against these models. Analysis of these attacks on the state of the art transformers in NLP can help improve the robustness of these models against such adversarial inputs. In this paper, we present Adv-OLM, a black-box attack method that adapts the idea of Occlusion and Language Models (OLM) to the current state of the art attack methods. OLM is used to rank words of a sentence, which are later substituted using word replacement strategies. We experimentally show that our approach outperforms other attack methods for several text classification tasks.

We study the robustness of reinforcement learning (RL) with adversarially perturbed state observations, which aligns with the setting of many adversarial attacks to deep reinforcement learning (DRL) and is also important for rolling out real-world RL agent under unpredictable sensing noise. With a fixed agent policy, we demonstrate that an optimal adversary to perturb state observations can be found, which is guaranteed to obtain the worst case agent reward. For DRL settings, this leads to a novel empirical adversarial attack to RL agents via a learned adversary that is much stronger than previous ones. To enhance the robustness of an agent, we propose a framework of alternating training with learned adversaries (ATLA), which trains an adversary online together with the agent using policy gradient following the optimal adversarial attack framework. Additionally, inspired by the analysis of state-adversarial Markov decision process (SA-MDP), we show that past states and actions (history) can be useful for learning a robust agent, and we empirically find a LSTM based policy can be more robust under adversaries. Empirical evaluations on a few continuous control environments show that ATLA achieves state-of-the-art performance under strong adversaries. Our code is available at https://github.com/huanzhang12/ATLA_robust_RL.