The nutrient content of our vegetables is down 40% over the last two decades and our soil health is suffering due to increasingly harsh herbicide use, according to Carbon Robotics founder Paul Mikesell. And farmers are increasingly concerned about the long-term health impacts of continually spraying chemicals on their fields. But not weeding will cost half your crop, killing profitability. A self-driving farm robot that kills 100,000 weeds an hour ... by laser. "We wanted [to] figure out if there's a better way we could do this."

NIR Calibration-Model Services NIR Machine Learning as a Service, a Game Changer for Productivity and Accuracy/Precision! ( NIRS Spectroscopy AI MLaaS) LINK Spectroscopy and Chemometrics News Weekly 43, 2021 NIRS NIR Spectroscopy MachineLearning Spectrometer Spectrometric Analytical Chemistry Chemical Analysis Lab Labs Laboratories Laboratory Software IoT Sensors QA QC Testing Quality LINK This week's NIR news Weekly is sponsored by Your-Company-Name-Here – NIR-spectrometers. Check out their product page … link Get the Spectroscopy and Chemometrics News Weekly in real time on Twitter @ CalibModel and follow us. Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) "Monitoring pilot-scale polyhydroxyalkanoate production from fruit pulp waste using near-infrared spectroscopy" LINK "Toward automated non-destructive diagnosis of chloride attack on concrete structures by near infrared spectroscopy" LINK "Spectra-structure correlations in NIR region of polymers from quantum chemical calculations.

Energy systems optimization problems are complex due to strongly non-linear system behavior and multiple competing objectives, e.g. economic gain vs. environmental impact. Moreover, a large number of input variables and different variable types, e.g. continuous and categorical, are challenges commonly present in real-world applications. In some cases, proposed optimal solutions need to obey explicit input constraints related to physical properties or safety-critical operating conditions. This paper proposes a novel data-driven strategy using tree ensembles for constrained multi-objective optimization of black-box problems with heterogeneous variable spaces for which underlying system dynamics are either too complex to model or unknown. In an extensive case study comprised of synthetic benchmarks and relevant energy applications we demonstrate the competitive performance and sampling efficiency of the proposed algorithm compared to other state-of-the-art tools, making it a useful all-in-one solution for real-world applications with limited evaluation budgets.

The collaboration will dramatically improve the way ROS and NVIDIA's line of products such as Isaac SIM and the Jetson line of embedded boards operate together.

TL;DR -- Silver-coated glass will naturally form "Neural Networks" (our recent and hyper-successful sort of artificial intelligence) when you shock it with electricity. The sparks melt the silver, forming wires that grow like roots, and it will find whatever patterns are waiting in the jolts of your encoded data. It learns on its own! Silver wants to form a brain. The silver plates are nowhere near as efficient as our modern computers, yet they would have been easy to discover, and they only require simple tools to get working!

Computational stress analysis is an important step in the design of material systems. Finite element method (FEM) is a standard approach of performing stress analysis of complex material systems. A way to accelerate stress analysis is to replace FEM with a data-driven machine learning based stress analysis approach. In this study, we consider a fiber-reinforced matrix composite material system and we use deep learning tools to find an alternative to the FEM approach for stress field prediction. We first try to predict stress field maps for composite material systems of fixed number of fibers with varying spatial configurations. Specifically, we try to find a mapping between the spatial arrangement of the fibers in the composite material and the corresponding von Mises stress field. This is achieved by using a convolutional neural network (CNN), specifically a U-Net architecture, using true stress maps of systems with same number of fibers as training data. U-Net is a encoder-decoder network which in this study takes in the composite material image as an input and outputs the stress field image which is of the same size as the input image. We perform a robustness analysis by taking different initializations of the training samples to find the sensitivity of the prediction accuracy to the small number of training samples. When the number of fibers in the composite material system is increased for the same volume fraction, a finer finite element mesh discretization is required to represent the geometry accurately. This leads to an increase in the computational cost. Thus, the secondary goal here is to predict the stress field for systems with larger number of fibers with varying spatial configurations using information from the true stress maps of relatively cheaper systems of smaller fiber number.

Said Vladimir Puzyrev of Curtin Universitys Oil and Gas Innovation Centre and the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, "This project is an important step towards adding value to existing digital geochemical datasets." Researchers at Australia's Curtin University and the Geological Survey of Western Australia are using deep learning to analyze geochemical data as part of an effort to expand mineral exploration in the region. The Western Australia Mineral Exploration (WAMEX) database contains more than 50 million samples, making manual analysis cost prohibitive and time consuming. Curtin's Vladimir Puzyrev said, "The ultimate aim of this research project is to help identify new mineral deposits in Western Australia by analyzing big geochemical data using deep learning methods."

Machine learning can pinpoint "genes of importance" that help crops to grow with less fertilizer, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. It can also predict additional traits in plants and disease outcomes in animals, illustrating its applications beyond agriculture. Using genomic data to predict outcomes in agriculture and medicine is both a promise and challenge for systems biology. Researchers have been working to determine how to best use the vast amount of genomic data available to predict how organisms respond to changes in nutrition, toxins and pathogen exposure--which in turn would inform crop improvement, disease prognosis, epidemiology and public health. However, accurately predicting such complex outcomes in agriculture and medicine from genome-scale information remains a significant challenge.

Airborne magnetic data are commonly used to produce preliminary geological maps. Machine learning has the potential to partly fulfill this task rapidly and objectively, as geological mapping is comparable to a semantic segmentation problem. Because this method requires a high-quality dataset, we developed a data augmentation workflow that uses a 3D geological and magnetic susceptibility model as input. The workflow uses soft-constrained Multi-Point Statistics, to create many synthetic 3D geological models, and Sequential Gaussian Simulation algorithms, to populate the models with the appropriate magnetic distribution. Then, forward modeling is used to compute the airborne magnetic responses of the synthetic models, which are associated with their counterpart surficial lithologies. A Gated Shape Convolutional Neural Network algorithm was trained on a generated synthetic dataset to perform geological mapping of airborne magnetic data and detect lithological contacts. The algorithm also provides attention maps highlighting the structures at different scales, and clustering was applied to its high-level features to do a semi-supervised segmentation of the area. The validation conducted on a portion of the synthetic dataset and data from adjacent areas shows that the methodology is suitable to segment the surficial geology using airborne magnetic data. Especially, the clustering shows a good segmentation of the magnetic anomalies into a pertinent geological map. Moreover, the first attention map isolates the structures at low scales and shows a pertinent representation of the original data. Thus, our method can be used to produce preliminary geological maps of good quality and new representations of any area where a geological and petrophysical 3D model exists, or in areas sharing the same geological context, using airborne magnetic data only.

Active learning is a subfield of machine learning that is devised for design and modeling of systems with highly expensive sampling costs. Industrial and engineering systems are generally subject to physics constraints that may induce fatal failures when they are violated, while such constraints are frequently underestimated in active learning. In this paper, we develop a novel active learning method that avoids failures considering implicit physics constraints that govern the system. The proposed approach is driven by two tasks: the safe variance reduction explores the safe region to reduce the variance of the target model, and the safe region expansion aims to extend the explorable region exploiting the probabilistic model of constraints. The global acquisition function is devised to judiciously optimize acquisition functions of two tasks, and its theoretical properties are provided. The proposed method is applied to the composite fuselage assembly process with consideration of material failure using the Tsai-wu criterion, and it is able to achieve zero-failure without the knowledge of explicit failure regions.