Energy consumption in buildings, both residential and commercial, accounts for approximately 40% of all energy usage in the U.S., and similar numbers are being reported from countries around the world. This significant amount of energy is used to maintain a comfortable, secure, and productive environment for the occupants. So, it is crucial that the energy consumption in buildings must be optimized, all the while maintaining satisfactory levels of occupant comfort, health, and safety. Recently, Machine Learning has been proven to be an invaluable tool in deriving important insights from data and optimizing various systems. In this work, we review the ways in which machine learning has been leveraged to make buildings smart and energy-efficient. For the convenience of readers, we provide a brief introduction of several machine learning paradigms and the components and functioning of each smart building system we cover. Finally, we discuss challenges faced while implementing machine learning algorithms in smart buildings and provide future avenues for research at the intersection of smart buildings and machine learning.

Recent technological advancements in space, air and ground components have made possible a new network paradigm called "space-air-ground integrated network" (SAGIN). Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a key role in SAGINs. However, due to UAVs' high dynamics and complexity, the real-world deployment of a SAGIN becomes a major barrier for realizing such SAGINs. Compared to the space and terrestrial components, UAVs are expected to meet performance requirements with high flexibility and dynamics using limited resources. Therefore, employing UAVs in various usage scenarios requires well-designed planning in algorithmic approaches. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of recent learning-based algorithmic approaches. We consider possible reward functions and discuss the state-of-the-art algorithms for optimizing the reward functions, including Q-learning, deep Q-learning, multi-armed bandit (MAB), particle swarm optimization (PSO) and satisfaction-based learning algorithms. Unlike other survey papers, we focus on the methodological perspective of the optimization problem, which can be applicable to various UAV-assisted missions on a SAGIN using these algorithms. We simulate users and environments according to real-world scenarios and compare the learning-based and PSO-based methods in terms of throughput, load, fairness, computation time, etc. We also implement and evaluate the 2-dimensional (2D) and 3-dimensional (3D) variations of these algorithms to reflect different deployment cases. Our simulation suggests that the $3$D satisfaction-based learning algorithm outperforms the other approaches for various metrics in most cases. We discuss some open challenges at the end and our findings aim to provide design guidelines for algorithm selections while optimizing the deployment of UAV-assisted SAGINs.

Task learning in neural networks typically requires finding a globally optimal minimizer to a loss function objective. Conventional designs of swarm based optimization methods apply a fixed update rule, with possibly an adaptive step-size for gradient descent based optimization. While these methods gain huge success in solving different optimization problems, there are some cases where these schemes are either inefficient or suffering from local-minimum. We present a new particle-swarm-based framework utilizing Gaussian Process Regression to learn the underlying dynamical process of descent. The biggest advantage of this approach is greater exploration around the current state before deciding a descent direction. Empirical results show our approach can escape from the local minima compare with the widely-used state-of-the-art optimizers when solving non-convex optimization problems. We also test our approach under high-dimensional parameter space case, namely, image classification task.

We investigate top-$m$ arm identification, a basic problem in bandit theory, in a multi-agent learning model in which agents collaborate to learn an objective function. We are interested in designing collaborative learning algorithms that achieve maximum speedup (compared to single-agent learning algorithms) using minimum communication cost, as communication is frequently the bottleneck in multi-agent learning. We give both algorithmic and impossibility results, and conduct a set of experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms.

Large public gatherings or crowds are commonplace and have been the subject of simulation research in many studies related to crowd management, disaster management and evacuation planning (Babojelić and Novacko 2020). However, in-depth research on pedestrians has been hindered by difficulties such as complex individual behaviours, different disaster characteristics, and varying environmental factors (Wijermans and Templeton 2022). As evacuee behaviour and movement vary in different scenarios, a number of field observations and simulation experiments have been conducted to explore pedestrian flows, movement patterns and potential factors affecting evacuation under different types of emergencies (Rozo et al. 2019; Feng et al. 2021; Sevtsuk and Kalvo 2022). Despite many simulation studies of pedestrian behaviours, few common behavioural features of pedestrian flows have been explored (Vermuyten et al. 2016; Babojelić and Novacko 2020). One of the main obstacles is the lack of experimental datasets that closely match individual movements during evacuations in the real world.

Recent years have witnessed substantial growth in adaptive traffic signal control (ATSC) methodologies that improve transportation network efficiency, especially in branches leveraging artificial intelligence based optimization and control algorithms such as reinforcement learning as well as conventional model predictive control. However, lack of cross-domain analysis and comparison of the effectiveness of applied methods in ATSC research limits our understanding of existing challenges and research directions. This chapter proposes a novel unified view of modern ATSCs to identify common ground as well as differences and shortcomings of existing methodologies with the ultimate goal to facilitate cross-fertilization and advance the state-of-the-art. The unified view applies the mathematical language of the Markov decision process, describes the process of controller design from both the world (problem) and solution modeling perspectives. The unified view also analyses systematic issues commonly ignored in existing studies and suggests future potential directions to resolve these issues.

We study the problem of learning a linear system model from the obse rvations of M clients. The catch: Each agent is observing data from a different dynamical system. This work addresses the question of how multiple systems collaboratively learn dynamical models in the presence of heterogeneity. We pose this problem as a federa ted learning problem and characterize the tension between achievable performance an d system heterogeneity. Furthermore, we provide a sample complexity result that obtains a c onstant factor improvement over the single agent setting. Finally, we describe a meta federated learning algorithm, FedSysID, that leverages existing federated algorithms at the client level.

If we want to train robots in simulation before deploying them in reality, it seems natural and almost self-evident to presume that reducing the sim2real gap involves creating simulators of increasing fidelity (since reality is what it is). We challenge this assumption and present a contrary hypothesis -- sim2real transfer of robots may be improved with lower (not higher) fidelity simulation. We conduct a systematic large-scale evaluation of this hypothesis on the problem of visual navigation -- in the real world, and on 2 different simulators (Habitat and iGibson) using 3 different robots (A1, AlienGo, Spot). Our results show that, contrary to expectation, adding fidelity does not help with learning; performance is poor due to slow simulation speed (preventing large-scale learning) and overfitting to inaccuracies in simulation physics. Instead, building simple models of the robot motion using real-world data can improve learning and generalization.

We study a novel graph path planning problem for multiple agents that may crash at runtime, and block part of the workspace. In our setting, agents can detect neighboring crashed agents, and change followed paths at runtime. The objective is then to prepare a set of paths and switching rules for each agent, ensuring that all correct agents reach their destinations without collisions or deadlocks, despite unforeseen crashes of other agents. Such planning is attractive to build reliable multi-robot systems. We present problem formalization, theoretical analysis such as computational complexities, and how to solve this offline planning problem.

Although quantum supremacy is yet to come, there has recently been an increasing interest in identifying the potential of quantum machine learning (QML) in the looming era of practical quantum computing. Motivated by this, in this article we re-design multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) based on the unique characteristics of quantum neural networks (QNNs) having two separate dimensions of trainable parameters: angle parameters affecting the output qubit states, and pole parameters associated with the output measurement basis. Exploiting this dyadic trainability as meta-learning capability, we propose quantum meta MARL (QM2ARL) that first applies angle training for meta-QNN learning, followed by pole training for few-shot or local-QNN training. To avoid overfitting, we develop an angle-to-pole regularization technique injecting noise into the pole domain during angle training. Furthermore, by exploiting the pole as the memory address of each trained QNN, we introduce the concept of pole memory allowing one to save and load trained QNNs using only two-parameter pole values. We theoretically prove the convergence of angle training under the angle-to-pole regularization, and by simulation corroborate the effectiveness of QM2ARL in achieving high reward and fast convergence, as well as of the pole memory in fast adaptation to a time-varying environment.