In contrast to the rapid digitalization of several industries, agriculture suffers from low adoption of smart farming tools. While AI-driven digital agriculture tools can offer high-performing predictive functionalities, they lack tangible quantitative evidence on their benefits to the farmers. Field experiments can derive such evidence, but are often costly, time consuming and hence limited in scope and scale of application. To this end, we propose an observational causal inference framework for the empirical evaluation of the impact of digital tools on target farm performance indicators (e.g., yield in this case). This way, we can increase farmers' trust via enhancing the transparency of the digital agriculture market and accelerate the adoption of technologies that aim to secure farmer income resilience and global agricultural sustainability. As a case study, we designed and implemented a recommendation system for the optimal sowing time of cotton based on numerical weather predictions, which was used by a farmers' cooperative during the growing season of 2021. We then leverage agricultural knowledge, collected yield data, and environmental information to develop a causal graph of the farm system. Using the back-door criterion, we identify the impact of sowing recommendations on the yield and subsequently estimate it using linear regression, matching, inverse propensity score weighting and meta-learners. The results reveal that a field sown according to our recommendations exhibited a statistically significant yield increase that ranged from 12% to 17%, depending on the method. The effect estimates were robust, as indicated by the agreement among the estimation methods and four successful refutation tests. We argue that this approach can be implemented for decision support systems of other fields, extending their evaluation beyond a performance assessment of internal functionalities.

Crop phenology is crucial information for crop yield estimation and agricultural management. Traditionally, phenology has been observed from the ground; however Earth observation, weather and soil data have been used to capture the physiological growth of crops. In this work, we propose a new approach for the within-season phenology estimation for cotton at the field level. For this, we exploit a variety of Earth observation vegetation indices (derived from Sentinel-2) and numerical simulations of atmospheric and soil parameters. Our method is unsupervised to address the ever-present problem of sparse and scarce ground truth data that makes most supervised alternatives impractical in real-world scenarios. We applied fuzzy c-means clustering to identify the principal phenological stages of cotton and then used the cluster membership weights to further predict the transitional phases between adjacent stages. In order to evaluate our models, we collected 1,285 crop growth ground observations in Orchomenos, Greece. We introduced a new collection protocol, assigning up to two phenology labels that represent the primary and secondary growth stage in the field and thus indicate when stages are transitioning. Our model was tested against a baseline model that allowed to isolate the random agreement and evaluate its true competence. The results showed that our model considerably outperforms the baseline one, which is promising considering the unsupervised nature of the approach. The limitations and the relevant future work are thoroughly discussed. The ground observations are formatted in an ready-to-use dataset and will be available at https://github.com/Agri-Hub/cotton-phenology-dataset upon publication.

The continuous increase in global population and the impact of climate change on crop production are expected to affect the food sector significantly. In this context, there is need for timely, large-scale and precise mapping of crops for evidence-based decision making. A key enabler towards this direction are new satellite missions that freely offer big remote sensing data of high spatio-temporal resolution and global coverage. During the previous decade and because of this surge of big Earth observations, deep learning methods have dominated the remote sensing and crop mapping literature. Nevertheless, deep learning models require large amounts of annotated data that are scarce and hard-to-acquire. To address this problem, transfer learning methods can be used to exploit available annotations and enable crop mapping for other regions, crop types and years of inspection. In this work, we have developed and trained a deep learning model for paddy rice detection in South Korea using Sentinel-1 VH time-series. We then fine-tune the model for i) paddy rice detection in France and Spain and ii) barley detection in the Netherlands. Additionally, we propose a modification in the pre-trained weights in order to incorporate extra input features (Sentinel-1 VV). Our approach shows excellent performance when transferring in different areas for the same crop type and rather promising results when transferring in a different area and crop type.

In contrast to the rapid digitalization of several industries, agriculture suffers from low adoption of climate-smart farming tools. Even though AI-driven digital agriculture can offer high-performing predictive functionalities, it lacks tangible quantitative evidence on its benefits to the farmers. Field experiments can derive such evidence, but are often costly and time consuming. To this end, we propose an observational causal inference framework for the empirical evaluation of the impact of digital tools on target farm performance indicators. This way, we can increase farmers' trust by enhancing the transparency of the digital agriculture market, and in turn accelerate the adoption of technologies that aim to increase productivity and secure a sustainable and resilient agriculture against a changing climate. As a case study, we perform an empirical evaluation of a recommendation system for optimal cotton sowing, which was used by a farmers' cooperative during the growing season of 2021. We leverage agricultural knowledge to develop a causal graph of the farm system, we use the back-door criterion to identify the impact of recommendations on the yield and subsequently estimate it using several methods on observational data. The results show that a field sown according to our recommendations enjoyed a significant increase in yield (12% to 17%).

To fight climate change and accommodate the increasing population, global crop production has to be strengthened. To achieve the "sustainable intensification" of agriculture, transforming it from carbon emitter to carbon sink is a priority, and understanding the environmental impact of agricultural management practices is a fundamental prerequisite to that. At the same time, the global agricultural landscape is deeply heterogeneous, with differences in climate, soil, and land use inducing variations in how agricultural systems respond to farmer actions. The "personalization" of sustainable agriculture with the provision of locally adapted management advice is thus a necessary condition for the efficient uplift of green metrics, and an integral development in imminent policies. Here, we formulate personalized sustainable agriculture as a Conditional Average Treatment Effect estimation task and use Causal Machine Learning for tackling it. Leveraging climate data, land use information and employing Double Machine Learning, we estimate the heterogeneous effect of sustainable practices on the field-level Soil Organic Carbon content in Lithuania. We thus provide a data-driven perspective for targeting sustainable practices and effectively expanding the global carbon sink.

In this paper, a hyperparameter tuning based Bayesian optimization of digital twins is carried out to diagnose various faults in grid connected inverters. As fault detection and diagnosis require very high precision, we channelize our efforts towards an online optimization of the digital twins, which, in turn, allows a flexible implementation with limited amount of data. As a result, the proposed framework not only becomes a practical solution for model versioning and deployment of digital twins design with limited data, but also allows integration of deep learning tools to improve the hyperparameter tuning capabilities. For classification performance assessment, we consider different fault cases in virtual synchronous generator (VSG) controlled grid-forming converters and demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Our research outcomes reveal the increased accuracy and fidelity levels achieved by our digital twin design, overcoming the shortcomings of traditional hyperparameter tuning methods.

Climate change is expected to aggravate wildfire activity through the exacerbation of fire weather. Improving our capabilities to anticipate wildfires on a global scale is of uttermost importance for mitigating their negative effects. In this work, we create a global fire dataset and demonstrate a prototype for predicting the presence of global burned areas on a sub-seasonal scale with the use of segmentation deep learning models. Particularly, we present an open-access global analysis-ready datacube, which contains a variety of variables related to the seasonal and sub-seasonal fire drivers (climate, vegetation, oceanic indices, human-related variables), as well as the historical burned areas and wildfire emissions for 2001-2021. We train a deep learning model, which treats global wildfire forecasting as an image segmentation task and skillfully predicts the presence of burned areas 8, 16, 32 and 64 days ahead of time. Our work motivates the use of deep learning for global burned area forecasting and paves the way towards improved anticipation of global wildfire patterns.

及时，准确地检测功率电子中的异常，对于维持复杂的生产系统而变得越来越重要。强大而可解释的策略有助于减少系统的停机时间，并抢占或减轻基础设施网络攻击。这项工作从解释当前数据集和机器学习算法输出中存在的不确定性类型开始。然后引入和分析三种打击这些不确定性的技术。我们进一步介绍了两种异常检测和分类方法，即矩阵曲线算法和异常变压器，它们是在电源电子转换器数据集的背景下应用的。具体而言，矩阵配置文件算法被证明非常适合作为检测流时间序列数据中实时异常的概括方法。迭代矩阵配置文件的结构python库实现用于创建检测器。创建了一系列自定义过滤器并将其添加到检测器中，以调整其灵敏度，回忆和检测精度。我们的数值结果表明，通过简单的参数调整，检测器在各种故障场景中提供了高精度和性能。

这项研究通过将文本分析技术应用于歌词来探讨音乐偏好与道德价值观之间的关联。从Facebook主持的应用程序中收集数据，我们将1,386个用户的心理计量学分数与来自Facebook页面喜欢的歌曲中的前5首歌曲中的歌词相提并论。我们提取了与每首歌的总体叙事，道德价，情感和情感有关的一组抒情特征。机器学习框架旨在利用回归方法，并评估抒情特征的预测能力来推断道德价值。结果表明，艺术家顶级歌曲的歌词喜欢告知他们的道德。层次结构和传统的优点比同理心和平等的值（$ .08 \ leq r \ leq .11 $）获得更高的预测分数（$ .20 \ leq r \ leq .30 $），而基本人口统计学变量仅为a模型的解释性中的一小部分。这显示了音乐听力行为的重要性，如通过抒情偏好所评估，仅在捕获道德价值方面就进行了评估。我们讨论技术和音乐的含义以及可能的未来改进。

在现代环境和社会问题的背景下，人们对能够识别土木工程系统的管理策略的方法的需求越来越大，最大程度地降低了结构性故障风险，同时最好计划检查和维护（I＆M）流程。由于与联合系统级状态描述下的全局优化方法相关的计算复杂性，大多数可用方法将I＆M决策问题简化为组件级别。在本文中，我们提出了一个有效的算法框架，用于在暴露于恶化环境的工程系统下进行推理和决策制定，从而直接在系统级别提供最佳的管理策略。在我们的方法中，决策问题被提出为部分可观察到的马尔可夫决策过程，其动态是在贝叶斯网络条件结构中编码的。该方法可以通过高斯层次结构和动态贝叶斯网络在组件之间平等或一般，不平等的恶化相关性下处理环境。在政策优化方面，我们采用了深层分散的多代理参与者 - 批评（DDMAC）强化学习方法，其中政策由批评家网络指导的参与者神经网络近似。通过在模拟环境中包括劣化依赖性，并通过在系统级别制定成本模型，DDMAC策略本质上考虑了基本系统效应。通过对疲劳恶化下的9分和钢架进行的数值实验证明了这一点。结果表明，与最先进的启发式方法相比，DDMAC政策可提供可观的好处。 DDMAC策略对系统效应的固有考虑也可以根据学习的政策来解释。