Data Science for Science

Courtesy: UNDP Moldova Civilian drones today are flown under very specific and safe weather and wind conditions. This is because these drones have adaptive control algorithms that are lacking. This applies to remote-controlled drones as well as autonomous ones. The direct and specific effect of various wind conditions on aircraft dynamics, performance, and stability cannot be accurately characterised as a simple mathematical model. Engineers at Caltech have developed Neural-Fly, a deep-learning method that can help drones cope with new and unknown wind conditions in real time. Existing Machine Learning methods require a huge amount of data to train the model and adapting these large models in real-time is all but impossible. To overcome this, Neural-Fly was developed with a "separation strategy". Only a few parameters of the neural network must be updated in real time and this is achieved with a new meta-learning algorithm, which pre-trains the neural network so that only the...

  The world-famous electric vehicle manufacturing company Tesla has recently filed a patent. The patent is about a “Neural Network System with Hardware Adaptability”. It has come about by Tesla’s acquisition of a company called DeepScale, which is an AI startup specialising in Neural Network solutions. A Neural Network is a type of AI model which is inspired by the widely-accepted biological model of the brain. It is composed of artificial neurons connected to each other with a certain structure. Each neuron is a simple construct and models a simple computation. Multiple neurons connected in a structure forming a neural network can model very complex computations which can be used to extract meaningful information from data. Such capabilities can be harnessed for a wide-variety of applications: such as self-driving cars, the ones Tesla produces.  Neural Networks are incredibly efficient in finding patterns and providing control outputs once they have been trained and their...