To overcome range anxiety problem of Electric Vehicles (EVs), an accurate real-time energy consumption estimation is necessary, which can be used to provide the EV's driver with information about the remaining range in real-time. A hybrid CNN-BDT approach has been developed, in which Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to provide an energy consumption estimate considering the effect of temperature, wind speed, battery's SOC, auxiliary loads, road elevation, vehicle speed and acceleration. Further, Bagged Decision Tree (BDT) is used to fine tune the estimate. Unlike existing techniques, the proposed approach doesn't require internal vehicle parameters from manufacturer and can easily learn complex patterns even from noisy data. Comparison results with existing techniques show that the developed approach provides better estimates with least mean absolute energy deviation of 0.14.

A storyteller builds a narrative that captivates the audience, immersing them in the story. Storytelling is an interactive process. Though the listeners cannot affect what happens in the story, a good narrator observes the audience's responses and adjusts his/her storytelling accordingly. We present an automated storytelling agent that is aimed at achieving the same effect. While presenting a story, the user is given chances to give comments or ask questions. The agent estimates the user's preferences towards various topics from these responses and weighs the factors of novelty, current interest, and consistency for generating the next part of the narration. We describe the components of the agent, and an example of applying it for narrating a Chinese fantasy story.