因果和归因研究对于地球科学发现至关重要，对于为气候，生态和水政策提供信息至关重要。但是，当前的方法需要与科学和利益相关者挑战的复杂性以及数据可用性以及数据驱动方法的充分性相结合。除非通过物理学进行仔细的通知，否则它们会冒着将相关性与因果关系相关或因估计不准确而淹没的风险。鉴于自然实验，对照试验，干预措施和反事实检查通常是不切实际的，因此已经开发了信息理论方法，并在地球科学中不断完善。在这里，我们表明，基于转移熵的因果图最近在具有备受瞩目的发现的地球科学中变得流行，即使增强具有统计学意义，也可能是虚假的。我们开发了一种基于子样本的合奏方法，用于鲁棒性因果分析。模拟数据以及气候和生态水文中的观察表明，这种方法的鲁棒性和一致性。

El Nino Southern振荡（ENSO）是热带中央和东太平洋的海面温度（SST）的半周期波动，通过远程依赖或电信连接，影响世界各地的区域水文中的际变化。最近的研究表明了改进ENSO预测以及用于了解电信连接的复杂网络（CN）的深度学习（DL）方法的价值。然而，预测对Enso驱动的河流流动的差距包括DL的黑匣子性质，使用简单的ENSO指数来描述复杂的现象并将基于DL的ENSO预测翻译成河流预测。在这里，我们显示可解释的DL（XDL）方法，基于显着性图，可以提取全球SST中包含的可解释的预测信息，并发现对河流的新型SST信息区域和依赖结构，这些信息与气候网络结构串联，使得改进的预测性理解。我们的结果揭示了全球SST超越ENSO指数的更多信息内容，开发了对SSTS影响河流的新了解，并产生了与不确定性的改进的河流预测。观察，重新分析数据和地球系统模型模拟用于展示基于XDL-CN基于互际和分支尺度的气候预测的方法的价值。

基于物理学的数值模型代表了地球系统建模中的最先进，包括我们的最佳工具，用于产生洞察和预测。尽管计算能力快速增长，但对更高模型分辨率的感知需求压倒了最新一代电脑，降低了建模者为理解参数敏感性和表征变异性和不确定性而产生模拟的能力。因此，通常开发了代理模型以捕获全吹制数值的基本属性。最近的机器学习方法的成功，尤其是深度学习，跨越许多学科提供了复杂的非线性连接者表示可能能够捕获地球系统中的底层复杂结构和非线性过程的可能性。基于深度学习的仿真的难度测试，这是指数值模型的近似，是为了了解它们是否可以在计算效率方面与传统形式的代理模型相当，同时再现模型以可靠的方式再现模型。可以预期通过该测试的深度学习仿真，而不是捕获复杂进程和时空依赖性的简单模型来表现更好。在这里，我们检查了基于卫星的遥感的案例研究，深度学习方法可以可靠地代表来自代理模型的模拟，具有可比的计算效率。我们的结果令人鼓舞的是，深度学习仿真以可接受的准确性再现结果，并且往往更快的性能。我们阐明了我们对深度学习的高性能实现的改进步伐的更广泛的影响以及地球科学中更高分辨率模拟的渴望。

临时团队合作的进步有可能创建在现实世界应用程序中合作的代理商。但是，部署在现实世界中的代理人容易受到颠覆它们的意图的对手。在临时团队工作中，几乎没有研究对手的存在。我们解释了扩展临时团队工作以包括对手的存在的重要性，并澄清了为什么这个问题很困难。然后，我们提出了一些在临时团队合作中的新研究机会的指示，这会导致更强大的多代理网络物理基础设施系统。

The recent increase in public and academic interest in preserving biodiversity has led to the growth of the field of conservation technology. This field involves designing and constructing tools that utilize technology to aid in the conservation of wildlife. In this article, we will use case studies to demonstrate the importance of designing conservation tools with human-wildlife interaction in mind and provide a framework for creating successful tools. These case studies include a range of complexities, from simple cat collars to machine learning and game theory methodologies. Our goal is to introduce and inform current and future researchers in the field of conservation technology and provide references for educating the next generation of conservation technologists. Conservation technology not only has the potential to benefit biodiversity but also has broader impacts on fields such as sustainability and environmental protection. By using innovative technologies to address conservation challenges, we can find more effective and efficient solutions to protect and preserve our planet's resources.

A Digital Twin (DT) is a simulation of a physical system that provides information to make decisions that add economic, social or commercial value. The behaviour of a physical system changes over time, a DT must therefore be continually updated with data from the physical systems to reflect its changing behaviour. For resource-constrained systems, updating a DT is non-trivial because of challenges such as on-board learning and the off-board data transfer. This paper presents a framework for updating data-driven DTs of resource-constrained systems geared towards system health monitoring. The proposed solution consists of: (1) an on-board system running a light-weight DT allowing the prioritisation and parsimonious transfer of data generated by the physical system; and (2) off-board robust updating of the DT and detection of anomalous behaviours. Two case studies are considered using a production gas turbine engine system to demonstrate the digital representation accuracy for real-world, time-varying physical systems.

We consider infinite horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with fast-slow structure, meaning that certain parts of the state space move "fast" (and in a sense, are more influential) while other parts transition more "slowly." Such structure is common in real-world problems where sequential decisions need to be made at high frequencies, yet information that varies at a slower timescale also influences the optimal policy. Examples include: (1) service allocation for a multi-class queue with (slowly varying) stochastic costs, (2) a restless multi-armed bandit with an environmental state, and (3) energy demand response, where both day-ahead and real-time prices play a role in the firm's revenue. Models that fully capture these problems often result in MDPs with large state spaces and large effective time horizons (due to frequent decisions), rendering them computationally intractable. We propose an approximate dynamic programming algorithmic framework based on the idea of "freezing" the slow states, solving a set of simpler finite-horizon MDPs (the lower-level MDPs), and applying value iteration (VI) to an auxiliary MDP that transitions on a slower timescale (the upper-level MDP). We also extend the technique to a function approximation setting, where a feature-based linear architecture is used. On the theoretical side, we analyze the regret incurred by each variant of our frozen-state approach. Finally, we give empirical evidence that the frozen-state approach generates effective policies using just a fraction of the computational cost, while illustrating that simply omitting slow states from the decision modeling is often not a viable heuristic.

While the capabilities of autonomous systems have been steadily improving in recent years, these systems still struggle to rapidly explore previously unknown environments without the aid of GPS-assisted navigation. The DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge aimed to fast track the development of autonomous exploration systems by evaluating their performance in real-world underground search-and-rescue scenarios. Subterranean environments present a plethora of challenges for robotic systems, such as limited communications, complex topology, visually-degraded sensing, and harsh terrain. The presented solution enables long-term autonomy with minimal human supervision by combining a powerful and independent single-agent autonomy stack, with higher level mission management operating over a flexible mesh network. The autonomy suite deployed on quadruped and wheeled robots was fully independent, freeing the human supervision to loosely supervise the mission and make high-impact strategic decisions. We also discuss lessons learned from fielding our system at the SubT Final Event, relating to vehicle versatility, system adaptability, and re-configurable communications.

Machine learning is the dominant approach to artificial intelligence, through which computers learn from data and experience. In the framework of supervised learning, for a computer to learn from data accurately and efficiently, some auxiliary information about the data distribution and target function should be provided to it through the learning model. This notion of auxiliary information relates to the concept of regularization in statistical learning theory. A common feature among real-world datasets is that data domains are multiscale and target functions are well-behaved and smooth. In this paper, we propose a learning model that exploits this multiscale data structure and discuss its statistical and computational benefits. The hierarchical learning model is inspired by the logical and progressive easy-to-hard learning mechanism of human beings and has interpretable levels. The model apportions computational resources according to the complexity of data instances and target functions. This property can have multiple benefits, including higher inference speed and computational savings in training a model for many users or when training is interrupted. We provide a statistical analysis of the learning mechanism using multiscale entropies and show that it can yield significantly stronger guarantees than uniform convergence bounds.

Implicit Neural Representations (INR) have recently shown to be powerful tool for high-quality video compression. However, existing works are limiting as they do not explicitly exploit the temporal redundancy in videos, leading to a long encoding time. Additionally, these methods have fixed architectures which do not scale to longer videos or higher resolutions. To address these issues, we propose NIRVANA, which treats videos as groups of frames and fits separate networks to each group performing patch-wise prediction. This design shares computation within each group, in the spatial and temporal dimensions, resulting in reduced encoding time of the video. The video representation is modeled autoregressively, with networks fit on a current group initialized using weights from the previous group's model. To further enhance efficiency, we perform quantization of the network parameters during training, requiring no post-hoc pruning or quantization. When compared with previous works on the benchmark UVG dataset, NIRVANA improves encoding quality from 37.36 to 37.70 (in terms of PSNR) and the encoding speed by 12X, while maintaining the same compression rate. In contrast to prior video INR works which struggle with larger resolution and longer videos, we show that our algorithm is highly flexible and scales naturally due to its patch-wise and autoregressive designs. Moreover, our method achieves variable bitrate compression by adapting to videos with varying inter-frame motion. NIRVANA achieves 6X decoding speed and scales well with more GPUs, making it practical for various deployment scenarios.