Daily Papers

We present a statistical analysis of the connections between galactic bars, star formation, and active galactic nucleus (AGN) activity using 33,201 disk galaxies (0.01 < z < 0.05) from DESI DR1 cross-matched with Galaxy Zoo DESI. Based on morphological classifications, we identify 3,508 strongly barred and 8,335 weakly barred systems. We find that barred galaxies exhibit a clear bimodal distribution in color-mass space: weak bars are preferentially found in bluer, lower-mass disks, whereas strong bars are more common in massive, redder systems. Strongly barred galaxies are on average more massive and metal-rich than unbarred systems. In addition, strong bars enhance central SFRs in low-mass galaxies but reduce sSFRs in massive systems, reflecting a dual role where bars initially trigger central star formation but eventually promote quenching by accelerating gas consumption. In terms of nuclear activity, barred galaxies display a higher incidence of AGN activity. The presence of a bar is also associated with an increased fraction of powerful AGN, with the highest proportions found in strongly barred systems. However, the correlations between AGN activity and detailed bar structural parameters are weak, suggesting that the link between bars and nuclear activity is indirect and regulated by multiple factors. Overall, our results support a scenario in which bars facilitate angular-momentum transport and gas inflow, thereby driving central star formation and fueling supermassive black hole accretion while operating alongside other processes that shape galaxy evolution.

Today, scientific research is increasingly data-centric and compute-intensive, relying on data and models across distributed sources. However, it still faces challenges in the traditional cooperation mode, due to the high storage and computing cost, geo-location barriers, and local confidentiality regulations. The Jupyter environment has recently emerged and evolved as a vital virtual research environment for scientific computing, which researchers can use to scale computational analyses up to larger datasets and high-performance computing resources. Nevertheless, existing approaches lack robust support of a decentralized cooperation mode to unlock the full potential of decentralized collaborative scientific research, e.g., seamlessly secure data sharing. In this work, we change the basic structure and legacy norms of current research environments via the seamless integration of Jupyter with Ethereum blockchain capabilities. As such, it creates a Decentralized Virtual Research Environment (D-VRE) from private computational notebooks to decentralized collaborative research ecosystem. We propose a novel architecture for the D-VRE and prototype some essential D-VRE elements for enabling secure data sharing with decentralized identity, user-centric agreement-making, membership, and research asset management. To validate our method, we conducted an experimental study to test all functionalities of D-VRE smart contracts and their gas consumption. In addition, we deployed the D-VRE prototype on a test net of the Ethereum blockchain for demonstration. The feedback from the studies showcases the current prototype's usability, ease of use, and potential and suggests further improvements.

This study assesses air quality (AQ) and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the rapid expansion of data centers in Texas, a major hub due to infrastructure, electricity markets, and business conditions. AQ impacts were separated from GHG emissions to clarify sources, regulations, and mitigation strategies. Electricity consumption and cooling systems dominate GHG emissions, with a 10 megawatt data center generating about 37,668 metric tons CO2 annually, while construction materials and IT equipment add substantial embodied emissions. Local AQ impacts, often overlooked, arise from diesel backup generators, construction equipment, and commuting. Generator testing alone can emit about 12 metric tons of NOx annually per facility, worsening ozone issues in regions such as Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth. Mitigation strategies include advanced cooling, renewable energy procurement, cleaner backup power (fuel cells, batteries), sustainable construction, and standardized reporting. ERCOT forecasts project 39 to 78 gigawatts of new data center load by 2030, potentially leading to 170 to 205 million metric tons of annual CO2 emissions. Aggressive adoption of renewables and advanced technologies could cut emissions by 50 to 80 percent, avoiding 85 to 165 million metric tons of CO2. The study identifies research and policy gaps, including the need for cumulative air dispersion modeling, AQ-specific regulations, and mandatory efficiency standards. Findings underscore the importance of aligning Texas digital infrastructure growth with environmental and community health protections.

The rapid progress of Transformers in artificial intelligence has come at the cost of increased resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions due to growing model sizes. Prior work suggests using pretrained small models to improve training efficiency, but this approach may not be suitable for new model structures. On the other hand, training from scratch can be slow, and progressively stacking layers often fails to achieve significant acceleration. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method called Apollo, which prepares lessons for expanding operations by learning high-layer functionality during training of low layers. Our approach involves low-value-prioritized sampling (LVPS) to train different depths and weight sharing to facilitate efficient expansion. We also introduce an interpolation method for stable model depth extension. Experiments demonstrate that Apollo achieves state-of-the-art acceleration ratios, even rivaling methods using pretrained models, making it a universal and efficient solution for training deep models while reducing time, financial, and environmental costs.

Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) KPIs assess an organization's performance on issues such as climate change, greenhouse gas emissions, water consumption, waste management, human rights, diversity, and policies. ESG reports convey this valuable quantitative information through tables. Unfortunately, extracting this information is difficult due to high variability in the table structure as well as content. We propose Statements, a novel domain agnostic data structure for extracting quantitative facts and related information. We propose translating tables to statements as a new supervised deep-learning universal information extraction task. We introduce SemTabNet - a dataset of over 100K annotated tables. Investigating a family of T5-based Statement Extraction Models, our best model generates statements which are 82% similar to the ground-truth (compared to baseline of 21%). We demonstrate the advantages of statements by applying our model to over 2700 tables from ESG reports. The homogeneous nature of statements permits exploratory data analysis on expansive information found in large collections of ESG reports.

When modeling infrared or gamma-ray data as a linear combination of observed gas tracers, excess emission has been detected compared to expectations from known neutral and atomic gas as traced by HI and CO measurements, respectively. This excess might correspond to an additional gas component. This so-called "dark gas" (DG) has been observed in our Galaxy, as well as the Magellanic Clouds. For the first time, we investigate the correlation between visible extinction (Av) data and gas tracers on large scales in the solar neighborhood. Our work focuses on both the solar neighborhood (|b|>10degr), and the inner and outer Galaxy, as well as on four individual regions: Taurus, Orion, Cepheus-Polaris and Aquila-Ophiuchus. Thanks to the recent production of an all-sky Av map, we first perform the correlation between Av and both HI and CO emission over the most diffuse regions, to derive the optimal (Av/NH)^(ref) ratio. We then iterate the analysis over the entire regions to estimate the CO-to-H2 conversion factor as well as the DG mass fraction. The average extinction to gas column-density ratio in the solar neighborhood is found to be (Av/NH)^(ref)=6.53 10^(-22) mag. cm^2, with significant differences between the inner and outer Galaxy. We derive an average XCO value of 1.67 10^(20) H2 cm^(-2)/(K km s^(-1)). In the solar neighborhood, the gas mass in the dark component is found to be 19% relative to that in the atomic component and 164% relative to the one traced by CO. These results are compatible with the recent analysis using Planck data within the uncertainties of our measurements. We estimate the ratio of dark gas to total molecular gas to be 0.62 in the solar neighborhood. The HI-to-H2 and H2-to-CO transitions appear for Av simeq0.2 mag and Avsimeq1.5 mag, respectively, in agreement with theoretical models of dark-H2 gas.

Methane emissions from livestock, particularly cattle, significantly contribute to climate change. Effective methane emission mitigation strategies are crucial as the global population and demand for livestock products increase. We introduce Gasformer, a novel semantic segmentation architecture for detecting low-flow rate methane emissions from livestock, and controlled release experiments using optical gas imaging. We present two unique datasets captured with a FLIR GF77 OGI camera. Gasformer leverages a Mix Vision Transformer encoder and a Light-Ham decoder to generate multi-scale features and refine segmentation maps. Gasformer outperforms other state-of-the-art models on both datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness in detecting and segmenting methane plumes in controlled and real-world scenarios. On the livestock dataset, Gasformer achieves mIoU of 88.56%, surpassing other state-of-the-art models. Materials are available at: github.com/toqitahamid/Gasformer.

Livestock methane emissions represent 32% of human-caused methane production, making automated monitoring critical for climate mitigation strategies. We introduce GasTwinFormer, a hybrid vision transformer for real-time methane emission segmentation and dietary classification in optical gas imaging through a novel Mix Twin encoder alternating between spatially-reduced global attention and locally-grouped attention mechanisms. Our architecture incorporates a lightweight LR-ASPP decoder for multi-scale feature aggregation and enables simultaneous methane segmentation and dietary classification in a unified framework. We contribute the first comprehensive beef cattle methane emission dataset using OGI, containing 11,694 annotated frames across three dietary treatments. GasTwinFormer achieves 74.47% mIoU and 83.63% mF1 for segmentation while maintaining exceptional efficiency with only 3.348M parameters, 3.428G FLOPs, and 114.9 FPS inference speed. Additionally, our method achieves perfect dietary classification accuracy (100%), demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging diet-emission correlations. Extensive ablation studies validate each architectural component, establishing GasTwinFormer as a practical solution for real-time livestock emission monitoring. Please see our project page at gastwinformer.github.io.

Climate change is profoundly affecting nearly all aspects of life on earth, including human societies, economies and health. Various human activities are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions, including data centres and other sources of large-scale computation. Although many important scientific milestones have been achieved thanks to the development of high-performance computing, the resultant environmental impact has been underappreciated. In this paper, we present a methodological framework to estimate the carbon footprint of any computational task in a standardised and reliable way, based on the processing time, type of computing cores, memory available and the efficiency and location of the computing facility. Metrics to interpret and contextualise greenhouse gas emissions are defined, including the equivalent distance travelled by car or plane as well as the number of tree-months necessary for carbon sequestration. We develop a freely available online tool, Green Algorithms (www.green-algorithms.org), which enables a user to estimate and report the carbon footprint of their computation. The Green Algorithms tool easily integrates with computational processes as it requires minimal information and does not interfere with existing code, while also accounting for a broad range of CPUs, GPUs, cloud computing, local servers and desktop computers. Finally, by applying Green Algorithms, we quantify the greenhouse gas emissions of algorithms used for particle physics simulations, weather forecasts and natural language processing. Taken together, this study develops a simple generalisable framework and freely available tool to quantify the carbon footprint of nearly any computation. Combined with a series of recommendations to minimise unnecessary CO2 emissions, we hope to raise awareness and facilitate greener computation.

We present Vehicle Energy Dataset (VED), a novel large-scale dataset of fuel and energy data collected from 383 personal cars in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. This open dataset captures GPS trajectories of vehicles along with their time-series data of fuel, energy, speed, and auxiliary power usage. A diverse fleet consisting of 264 gasoline vehicles, 92 HEVs, and 27 PHEV/EVs drove in real-world from Nov, 2017 to Nov, 2018, where the data were collected through onboard OBD-II loggers. Driving scenarios range from highways to traffic-dense downtown area in various driving conditions and seasons. In total, VED accumulates approximately 374,000 miles. We discuss participant privacy protection and develop a method to de-identify personally identifiable information while preserving the quality of the data. After the de-identification, we conducted case studies on the dataset to investigate the impacts of factors known to affect fuel economy and identify energy-saving opportunities that hybrid-electric vehicles and eco-driving techniques can provide. The case studies are supplemented with a number of examples to demonstrate how VED can be utilized for vehicle energy and behavior studies. Potential research opportunities include data-driven vehicle energy consumption modeling, driver behavior modeling, machine and deep learning, calibration of traffic simulators, optimal route choice modeling, prediction of human driver behaviors, and decision making of self-driving cars. We believe that VED can be an instrumental asset to the development of future automotive technologies. The dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/gsoh/VED.

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, responsible for roughly 30\% of warming since pre-industrial times. A small number of large point sources account for a disproportionate share of emissions, creating an opportunity for substantial reductions by targeting relatively few sites. Detection and attribution of large emissions at scale for notification to asset owners remains challenging. Here, we introduce MARS-S2L, a machine learning model that detects methane emissions in publicly available multispectral satellite imagery. Trained on a manually curated dataset of over 80,000 images, the model provides high-resolution detections every two days, enabling facility-level attribution and identifying 78\% of plumes with an 8\% false positive rate at 697 previously unseen sites. Deployed operationally, MARS-S2L has issued 1,015 notifications to stakeholders in 20 countries, enabling verified, permanent mitigation of six persistent emitters, including a previously unknown site in Libya. These results demonstrate a scalable pathway from satellite detection to quantifiable methane mitigation.

AI computing and data centers consume a large amount of freshwater, both directly for cooling and indirectly for electricity generation. While most attention has been paid to developed countries such as the U.S., this paper presents the first-of-its-kind dataset that combines nation-level weather and electricity generation data to estimate water usage efficiency for data centers in 41 African countries across five different climate regions. We also use our dataset to evaluate and estimate the water consumption of inference on two large language models (i.e., Llama-3-70B and GPT-4) in 11 selected African countries. Our findings show that writing a 10-page report using Llama-3-70B could consume about 0.7 liters of water, while the water consumption by GPT-4 for the same task may go up to about 60 liters. For writing a medium-length email of 120-200 words, Llama-3-70B and GPT-4 could consume about 0.13 liters and 3 liters of water, respectively. Interestingly, given the same AI model, 8 out of the 11 selected African countries consume less water than the global average, mainly because of lower water intensities for electricity generation. However, water consumption can be substantially higher in some African countries with a steppe climate than the U.S. and global averages, prompting more attention when deploying AI computing in these countries. Our dataset is publicly available on https://huggingface.co/datasets/masterlion/WaterEfficientDatasetForAfricanCountries/tree/main{Hugging Face}.

The computation demand for machine learning (ML) has grown rapidly recently, which comes with a number of costs. Estimating the energy cost helps measure its environmental impact and finding greener strategies, yet it is challenging without detailed information. We calculate the energy use and carbon footprint of several recent large models-T5, Meena, GShard, Switch Transformer, and GPT-3-and refine earlier estimates for the neural architecture search that found Evolved Transformer. We highlight the following opportunities to improve energy efficiency and CO2 equivalent emissions (CO2e): Large but sparsely activated DNNs can consume <1/10th the energy of large, dense DNNs without sacrificing accuracy despite using as many or even more parameters. Geographic location matters for ML workload scheduling since the fraction of carbon-free energy and resulting CO2e vary ~5X-10X, even within the same country and the same organization. We are now optimizing where and when large models are trained. Specific datacenter infrastructure matters, as Cloud datacenters can be ~1.4-2X more energy efficient than typical datacenters, and the ML-oriented accelerators inside them can be ~2-5X more effective than off-the-shelf systems. Remarkably, the choice of DNN, datacenter, and processor can reduce the carbon footprint up to ~100-1000X. These large factors also make retroactive estimates of energy cost difficult. To avoid miscalculations, we believe ML papers requiring large computational resources should make energy consumption and CO2e explicit when practical. We are working to be more transparent about energy use and CO2e in our future research. To help reduce the carbon footprint of ML, we believe energy usage and CO2e should be a key metric in evaluating models, and we are collaborating with MLPerf developers to include energy usage during training and inference in this industry standard benchmark.

Reducing methane emissions is essential for mitigating global warming. To attribute methane emissions to their sources, a comprehensive dataset of methane source infrastructure is necessary. Recent advancements with deep learning on remotely sensed imagery have the potential to identify the locations and characteristics of methane sources, but there is a substantial lack of publicly available data to enable machine learning researchers and practitioners to build automated mapping approaches. To help fill this gap, we construct a multi-sensor dataset called METER-ML containing 86,599 georeferenced NAIP, Sentinel-1, and Sentinel-2 images in the U.S. labeled for the presence or absence of methane source facilities including concentrated animal feeding operations, coal mines, landfills, natural gas processing plants, oil refineries and petroleum terminals, and wastewater treatment plants. We experiment with a variety of models that leverage different spatial resolutions, spatial footprints, image products, and spectral bands. We find that our best model achieves an area under the precision recall curve of 0.915 for identifying concentrated animal feeding operations and 0.821 for oil refineries and petroleum terminals on an expert-labeled test set, suggesting the potential for large-scale mapping. We make METER-ML freely available at https://stanfordmlgroup.github.io/projects/meter-ml/ to support future work on automated methane source mapping.

Quantifying exhaled CO2 from free-roaming cattle is both a direct indicator of rumen metabolic state and a prerequisite for farm-scale carbon accounting, yet no existing system can deliver continuous, spatially resolved measurements without physical confinement or contact. We present TRACE (Thermal Recognition Attentive-Framework for CO2 Emissions from Livestock), the first unified framework to jointly address per-frame CO2 plume segmentation and clip-level emission flux classification from mid-wave infrared (MWIR) thermal video. TRACE contributes three domain-specific advances: a Thermal Gas-Aware Attention (TGAA) encoder that incorporates per-pixel gas intensity as a spatial supervisory signal to direct self-attention toward high-emission regions at each encoder stage; an Attention-based Temporal Fusion (ATF) module that captures breath-cycle dynamics through structured cross-frame attention for sequence-level flux classification; and a four-stage progressive training curriculum that couples both objectives while preventing gradient interference. Benchmarked against fifteen state-of-the-art models on the CO2 Farm Thermal Gas Dataset, TRACE achieves an mIoU of 0.998 and the best result on every segmentation and classification metric simultaneously, outperforming domain-specific gas segmenters with several times more parameters and surpassing all baselines in flux classification. Ablation studies confirm that each component is individually essential: gas-conditioned attention alone determines precise plume boundary localization, and temporal reasoning is indispensable for flux-level discrimination. TRACE establishes a practical path toward non-invasive, continuous, per-animal CO2 monitoring from overhead thermal cameras at commercial scale. Codes are available at https://github.com/taminulislam/trace.

The transformative power of AI is undeniable - but as user adoption accelerates, so does the need to understand and mitigate the environmental impact of AI serving. However, no studies have measured AI serving environmental metrics in a production environment. This paper addresses this gap by proposing and executing a comprehensive methodology for measuring the energy usage, carbon emissions, and water consumption of AI inference workloads in a large-scale, AI production environment. Our approach accounts for the full stack of AI serving infrastructure - including active AI accelerator power, host system energy, idle machine capacity, and data center energy overhead. Through detailed instrumentation of Google's AI infrastructure for serving the Gemini AI assistant, we find the median Gemini Apps text prompt consumes 0.24 Wh of energy - a figure substantially lower than many public estimates. We also show that Google's software efficiency efforts and clean energy procurement have driven a 33x reduction in energy consumption and a 44x reduction in carbon footprint for the median Gemini Apps text prompt over one year. We identify that the median Gemini Apps text prompt uses less energy than watching nine seconds of television (0.24 Wh) and consumes the equivalent of five drops of water (0.26 mL). While these impacts are low compared to other daily activities, reducing the environmental impact of AI serving continues to warrant important attention. Towards this objective, we propose that a comprehensive measurement of AI serving environmental metrics is critical for accurately comparing models, and to properly incentivize efficiency gains across the full AI serving stack.

In the shipping industry, fuel consumption and emissions are critical factors due to their significant impact on economic efficiency and environmental sustainability. Accurate prediction of ship fuel consumption is essential for further optimization of maritime operations. However, heterogeneous methodologies and limited high-quality datasets hinder direct comparison of modeling approaches. This paper makes three key contributions: (1) we introduce and release a new dataset (https://huggingface.co/datasets/krohnedigital/FuelCast) comprising operational and environmental data from three ships; (2) we define a standardized benchmark covering tabular regression and time-series regression (3) we investigate the application of in-context learning for ship consumption modeling using the TabPFN foundation model - a first in this domain to our knowledge. Our results demonstrate strong performance across all evaluated models, supporting the feasibility of onboard, data-driven fuel prediction. Models incorporating environmental conditions consistently outperform simple polynomial baselines relying solely on vessel speed. TabPFN slightly outperforms other techniques, highlighting the potential of foundation models with in-context learning capabilities for tabular prediction. Furthermore, including temporal context improves accuracy.

Heat pumps are essential for decarbonizing residential heating but consume substantial electrical energy, impacting operational costs and grid demand. Many systems run inefficiently due to planning flaws, operational faults, or misconfigurations. While optimizing performance requires skilled professionals, labor shortages hinder large-scale interventions. However, digital tools and improved data availability create new service opportunities for energy efficiency, predictive maintenance, and demand-side management. To support research and practical solutions, we present an open-source dataset of electricity consumption from 1,408 households with heat pumps and smart electricity meters in the canton of Zurich, Switzerland, recorded at 15-minute and daily resolutions between 2018-11-03 and 2024-03-21. The dataset includes household metadata, weather data from 8 stations, and ground truth data from 410 field visit protocols collected by energy consultants during system optimizations. Additionally, the dataset includes a Python-based data loader to facilitate seamless data processing and exploration.

In an era of increasing pressure to achieve sustainable agriculture, the optimization of livestock feed for enhancing yield and minimizing environmental impact is a paramount objective. This study presents a pioneering approach towards this goal, using rumen microbiome data to predict the efficacy of feed additives in dairy cattle. We collected an extensive dataset that includes methane emissions from 2,190 Holstein cows distributed across 34 distinct sites. The cows were divided into control and experimental groups in a double-blind, unbiased manner, accounting for variables such as age, days in lactation, and average milk yield. The experimental groups were administered one of four leading commercial feed additives: Agolin, Kexxtone, Allimax, and Relyon. Methane emissions were measured individually both before the administration of additives and over a subsequent 12-week period. To develop our predictive model for additive efficacy, rumen microbiome samples were collected from 510 cows from the same herds prior to the study's onset. These samples underwent deep metagenomic shotgun sequencing, yielding an average of 15.7 million reads per sample. Utilizing innovative artificial intelligence techniques we successfully estimated the efficacy of these feed additives across different farms. The model's robustness was further confirmed through validation with independent cohorts, affirming its generalizability and reliability. Our results underscore the transformative capability of using targeted feed additive strategies to both optimize dairy yield and milk composition, and to significantly reduce methane emissions. Specifically, our predictive model demonstrates a scenario where its application could guide the assignment of additives to farms where they are most effective. In doing so, we could achieve an average potential reduction of over 27\% in overall emissions.

Human-produced emissions are growing at an alarming rate, causing already observable changes in the climate and environment in general. Each year global carbon dioxide emissions hit a new record, and it is reported that 0.5% of total US greenhouse gas emissions are attributed to data centres as of 2021. The release of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked social interest in Large Language Models (LLMs), the new generation of Language Models with a large number of parameters and trained on massive amounts of data. Currently, numerous companies are releasing products featuring various LLMs, with many more models in development and awaiting release. Deep Learning research is a competitive field, with only models that reach top performance attracting attention and being utilized. Hence, achieving better accuracy and results is often the first priority, while the model's efficiency and the environmental impact of the study are neglected. However, LLMs demand substantial computational resources and are very costly to train, both financially and environmentally. It becomes essential to raise awareness and promote conscious decisions about algorithmic and hardware choices. Providing information on training time, the approximate carbon dioxide emissions and power consumption would assist future studies in making necessary adjustments and determining the compatibility of available computational resources with model requirements. In this study, we infused T5 LLM with external knowledge and fine-tuned the model for Question-Answering task. Furthermore, we calculated and reported the approximate environmental impact for both steps. The findings demonstrate that the smaller models may not always be sustainable options, and increased training does not always imply better performance. The most optimal outcome is achieved by carefully considering both performance and efficiency factors.

Machine learning (ML) requires using energy to carry out computations during the model training process. The generation of this energy comes with an environmental cost in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, depending on quantity used and the energy source. Existing research on the environmental impacts of ML has been limited to analyses covering a small number of models and does not adequately represent the diversity of ML models and tasks. In the current study, we present a survey of the carbon emissions of 95 ML models across time and different tasks in natural language processing and computer vision. We analyze them in terms of the energy sources used, the amount of CO2 emissions produced, how these emissions evolve across time and how they relate to model performance. We conclude with a discussion regarding the carbon footprint of our field and propose the creation of a centralized repository for reporting and tracking these emissions.

This article attempts answering the following problematic: How to model and classify energy consumption profiles over a large distributed territory to optimize the management of buildings' consumption? Doing case-by-case in depth auditing of thousands of buildings would require a massive amount of time and money as well as a significant number of qualified people. Thus, an automated method must be developed to establish a relevant and effective recommendations system. To answer this problematic, pretopology is used to model the sites' consumption profiles and a multi-criterion hierarchical classification algorithm, using the properties of pretopological space, has been developed in a Python library. To evaluate the results, three data sets are used: A generated set of dots of various sizes in a 2D space, a generated set of time series and a set of consumption time series of 400 real consumption sites from a French Energy company. On the point data set, the algorithm is able to identify the clusters of points using their position in space and their size as parameter. On the generated time series, the algorithm is able to identify the time series clusters using Pearson's correlation with an Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) of 1.

Buildings are significant contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 26% of global energy sector emissions in 2022. Meeting net zero goals requires a rapid reduction in building emissions, both directly from the buildings and indirectly from the production of electricity and heat used in buildings. National energy planning for net zero demands both detailed and comprehensive building energy consumption data. However, geo-located building-level energy data is rarely available in Europe, with analysis typically relying on anonymised, simulated or low-resolution data. To address this problem, we introduce a dataset of Neighbourhood Energy, Buildings, and Urban Landscapes (NEBULA) for modelling domestic energy consumption for small neighbourhoods (5-150 households). NEBULA integrates data on building characteristics, climate, urbanisation, environment, and socio-demographics and contains 609,964 samples across England and Wales.

As AI systems proliferate, their greenhouse gas emissions are an increasingly important concern for human societies. We analyze the emissions of several AI systems (ChatGPT, BLOOM, DALL-E2, Midjourney) relative to those of humans completing the same tasks. We find that an AI writing a page of text emits 130 to 1500 times less CO2e than a human doing so. Similarly, an AI creating an image emits 310 to 2900 times less. Emissions analysis do not account for social impacts such as professional displacement, legality, and rebound effects. In addition, AI is not a substitute for all human tasks. Nevertheless, at present, the use of AI holds the potential to carry out several major activities at much lower emission levels than can humans.

The European Green Deal aims to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, which demands improved emissions efficiency from the transportation industry. This study uses an agent-based simulation to analyze the sustainability impacts of shared autonomous shuttles. We forecast travel demands for 2050 and simulate regulatory interventions in the form of replacing private cars with a fleet of shared autonomous shuttles in specific areas. We derive driving-related emissions, energy consumption, and non-driving-related emissions to calculate life-cycle emissions. We observe reduced life-cycle emissions from 0.4% to 9.6% and reduced energy consumption from 1.5% to 12.2%.

The carbon footprint associated with large language models (LLMs) is a significant concern, encompassing emissions from their training, inference, experimentation, and storage processes, including operational and embodied carbon emissions. An essential aspect is accurately estimating the carbon impact of emerging LLMs even before their training, which heavily relies on GPU usage. Existing studies have reported the carbon footprint of LLM training, but only one tool, mlco2, can predict the carbon footprint of new neural networks prior to physical training. However, mlco2 has several serious limitations. It cannot extend its estimation to dense or mixture-of-experts (MoE) LLMs, disregards critical architectural parameters, focuses solely on GPUs, and cannot model embodied carbon footprints. Addressing these gaps, we introduce \carb, an end-to-end carbon footprint projection model designed for both dense and MoE LLMs. Compared to mlco2, \carb~significantly enhances the accuracy of carbon footprint estimations for various LLMs. The source code is released at https://github.com/SotaroKaneda/MLCarbon.

Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) are increasingly significant in modern cities due to their potential to reduce air pollution. Precise and real-time estimation of energy consumption for them is imperative for effective itinerary planning and optimizing vehicle systems, which can reduce driving range anxiety and decrease energy costs. As public awareness of data privacy increases, adopting approaches that safeguard data privacy in the context of BEV energy consumption modeling is crucial. Federated Learning (FL) is a promising solution mitigating the risk of exposing sensitive information to third parties by allowing local data to remain on devices and only sharing model updates with a central server. Our work investigates the potential of using FL methods, such as FedAvg, and FedPer, to improve BEV energy consumption prediction while maintaining user privacy. We conducted experiments using data from 10 BEVs under simulated real-world driving conditions. Our results demonstrate that the FedAvg-LSTM model achieved a reduction of up to 67.84\% in the MAE value of the prediction results. Furthermore, we explored various real-world scenarios and discussed how FL methods can be employed in those cases. Our findings show that FL methods can effectively improve the performance of BEV energy consumption prediction while maintaining user privacy.

The rise of machine learning (ML) systems has exacerbated their carbon footprint due to increased capabilities and model sizes. However, there is scarce knowledge on how the carbon footprint of ML models is actually measured, reported, and evaluated. In light of this, the paper aims to analyze the measurement of the carbon footprint of 1,417 ML models and associated datasets on Hugging Face, which is the most popular repository for pretrained ML models. The goal is to provide insights and recommendations on how to report and optimize the carbon efficiency of ML models. The study includes the first repository mining study on the Hugging Face Hub API on carbon emissions. This study seeks to answer two research questions: (1) how do ML model creators measure and report carbon emissions on Hugging Face Hub?, and (2) what aspects impact the carbon emissions of training ML models? The study yielded several key findings. These include a stalled proportion of carbon emissions-reporting models, a slight decrease in reported carbon footprint on Hugging Face over the past 2 years, and a continued dominance of NLP as the main application domain. Furthermore, the study uncovers correlations between carbon emissions and various attributes such as model size, dataset size, and ML application domains. These results highlight the need for software measurements to improve energy reporting practices and promote carbon-efficient model development within the Hugging Face community. In response to this issue, two classifications are proposed: one for categorizing models based on their carbon emission reporting practices and another for their carbon efficiency. The aim of these classification proposals is to foster transparency and sustainable model development within the ML community.

Artificial intelligence systems significantly impact the environment, particularly in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. These tasks often require extensive computational resources to train deep neural networks, including large-scale language models containing billions of parameters. This study analyzes the trade-offs between energy consumption and performance across three neural language models: two pre-trained models (T5-base and BART-base), and one large language model (LLaMA 3-8B). These models were fine-tuned for the text summarization task, focusing on generating research paper highlights that encapsulate the core themes of each paper. A wide range of evaluation metrics, including ROUGE, METEOR, MoverScore, BERTScore, and SciBERTScore, were employed to assess their performance. Furthermore, the carbon footprint associated with fine-tuning each model was measured, offering a comprehensive assessment of their environmental impact. This research underscores the importance of incorporating environmental considerations into the design and implementation of neural language models and calls for the advancement of energy-efficient AI methodologies.

Machine Learning (ML) workloads have rapidly grown in importance, but raised concerns about their carbon footprint. Four best practices can reduce ML training energy by up to 100x and CO2 emissions up to 1000x. By following best practices, overall ML energy use (across research, development, and production) held steady at <15% of Google's total energy use for the past three years. If the whole ML field were to adopt best practices, total carbon emissions from training would reduce. Hence, we recommend that ML papers include emissions explicitly to foster competition on more than just model quality. Estimates of emissions in papers that omitted them have been off 100x-100,000x, so publishing emissions has the added benefit of ensuring accurate accounting. Given the importance of climate change, we must get the numbers right to make certain that we work on its biggest challenges.

Obesity, the leading cause of many non-communicable diseases, occurs mainly for eating more than our body requirements and lack of proper activity. So, being healthy requires heathy diet plans, especially for patients with comorbidities. But it is difficult to figure out the exact quantity of each nutrient because nutrients requirement varies based on physical and disease conditions. In our study we proposed a novel machine learning based system to predict the amount of nutrients one individual requires for being healthy. We applied different machine learning algorithms: linear regression, support vector machine (SVM), decision tree, random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM on fluid and 3 other major micronutrients: carbohydrate, protein, fat consumption prediction. We achieved high accuracy with low root mean square error (RMSE) by using linear regression in fluid prediction, random forest in carbohydrate prediction and LightGBM in protein and fat prediction. We believe our diet recommender system, OBESEYE, is the only of its kind which recommends diet with the consideration of comorbidities and physical conditions and promote encouragement to get rid of obesity.