Energy Companies Using AI for Cost-Efficiency

Ellen Chang, 5 Energy Companies Using AI for Cost-Efficiency, US News, April 12, 2019.

Companies use AI to detect faults such as cracks in pipelines and machinery by analyzing images. This saves companies money and minimizes downtime when equipment breaks down, says Guido Jouret, chief digital officer of ABB, a Swiss power and automation company. 

"An AI pilot project with one of the world's largest hydroelectric utilities showed a 10% reduction in routine maintenance and a 2% increase in output," he says. "These measures translate into millions of dollars in cost savings."... 

Schneider Electric leverages Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) machine learning capabilities to monitor and configure pumps in the oil and gas field remotely since early detection of a pump failure can avoid weeks of the equipment being out of commission and repair costs of up to $1 million. 

"Our customer Tata Power, India's largest power generator saved almost $300,000 on a single predictive maintenance catch," he says.

Gogoro 2019 大佈局

Chris，新獲 72 億聯貸案，Gogoro 跟我們談了 2019 大佈局，Inside，2019/04/03

「台灣的電不乾淨嗎？」陸學森首先解釋一些關於電力的迷思。 

事實上台灣只有 4% 的 PM2.5 來自電廠發電，然而有 25% 的 PM 2.5 來自汽機車排放；電動機車能源效率比較差嗎？錯了，燃油機車一公升最多只能跑 38 公里，但用在發電再儲存到電動機車，足足可以跑 85 公里。 

「那電動機車會不會很耗電嗎？」但實際上一天的家庭總用電，其實就足夠給電動機車騎22天。電動機車平均一天騎起來只用0.56度，算起來就算全台1386萬台機車都變電動車了，也只佔台灣一天發電量 1.2%。但更特別的是，Gogoro 電網也跳開了全台一般的用電習慣，在晚上才充電去平衡電網需求。... 

「初期有一大部分馬達就是士林電機幫我們做的。」陸學森也很自豪地說，Gogoro 高技術的馬達與零件也對台灣生產鏈起了升級作用。目前 Gogoro 自有生產線就有 48 組機器手臂、30 道工作模組，確實落實了工業 4.0 的概念。 

談到換電，目前他們在台灣投資超過 105 億用於智慧電網裡，現在台灣 1200 站，預計年底前要鋪到 1500 站，完成全台車主平均 2 公里內就有站可以換電的目標。

Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI by the European Commission

Ethics guidelines for trustworthy AI, REPORT / STUDY8 April 2019

According to the guidelines, trustworthy AI should be:
(1) lawful -  respecting all applicable laws and regulations
(2) ethical - respecting ethical principles and values
(3) robust - both from a technical perspective while taking into account its social environment 

The guidelines put forward a set of 7 key requirements that AI systems should meet in order to be deemed trustworthy. A specific assessment list aims to help verify the application of each of the key requirements.

How To Take a Picture of a Black Hole

Katie Bouman, 2017/4/28

AI-Based Massively Multivariate Conversion Rate Optimization (轉換率最佳化)

R. Miikkulainen, et al., Sentient Ascend: AI-Based Massively Multivariate Conversion Rate Optimization, 2018 AAAI.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) means designing an ecommerce web interface so that as many users as possible take a desired action such as registering for an account, requesting a contact, or making a purchase. Such design is usually done by hand, evaluating one change at a time through A/B testing, or evaluating all combinations of two or three variables through multivariate testing. Traditional CRO is thus limited to a small fraction of the design space only. This paper describes Sentient Ascend, an automatic CRO system that uses evolutionary search to discover effective web interfaces given a human-designed search space. Design candidates are evaluated in parallel on line with real users, making it possible to discover and utilize interactions between the design elements that are difficult to identify otherwise. A commercial product since September 2016, Ascend has been applied to numerous web interfaces across industries and search space sizes, with up to four-fold improvements over human design. Ascend can therefore be seen as massively multivariate CRO made possible by AI.