Sustainable energyEnergy is sustainable if it "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." Most definitions of sustainable energy include considerations of environmental aspects such as greenhouse gas emissions and social and economic aspects such as energy poverty. Renewable energy sources such as wind, hydroelectric power, solar, and geothermal energy are generally far more sustainable than fossil fuel sources.
LearningLearning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants. Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences. The changes induced by learning often last a lifetime, and it is hard to distinguish learned material that seems to be "lost" from that which cannot be retrieved.
Estimation theoryEstimation theory is a branch of statistics that deals with estimating the values of parameters based on measured empirical data that has a random component. The parameters describe an underlying physical setting in such a way that their value affects the distribution of the measured data. An estimator attempts to approximate the unknown parameters using the measurements.
Green roofA green roof or living roof is a roof of a building that is partially or completely covered with vegetation and a growing medium, planted over a waterproofing membrane. It may also include additional layers such as a root barrier and drainage and irrigation systems. Container gardens on roofs, where plants are maintained in pots, are not generally considered to be true green roofs, although this is debated. Rooftop ponds are another form of green roofs which are used to treat greywater.
Active learning (machine learning)Active learning is a special case of machine learning in which a learning algorithm can interactively query a user (or some other information source) to label new data points with the desired outputs. In statistics literature, it is sometimes also called optimal experimental design. The information source is also called teacher or oracle. There are situations in which unlabeled data is abundant but manual labeling is expensive. In such a scenario, learning algorithms can actively query the user/teacher for labels.
Text-to-image modelA text-to-image model is a machine learning model which takes an input natural language description and produces an image matching that description. Such models began to be developed in the mid-2010s, as a result of advances in deep neural networks. In 2022, the output of state of the art text-to-image models, such as OpenAI's DALL-E 2, Google Brain's , StabilityAI's Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney began to approach the quality of real photographs and human-drawn art.
RoofA roof (: roofs or rooves) is the top covering of a building, including all materials and constructions necessary to support it on the walls of the building or on uprights, providing protection against rain, snow, sunlight, extremes of temperature, and wind. A roof is part of the building envelope. The characteristics of a roof are dependent upon the purpose of the building that it covers, the available roofing materials and the local traditions of construction and wider concepts of architectural design and practice, and may also be governed by local or national legislation.
Meta-learning (computer science)Meta learning is a subfield of machine learning where automatic learning algorithms are applied to metadata about machine learning experiments. As of 2017, the term had not found a standard interpretation, however the main goal is to use such metadata to understand how automatic learning can become flexible in solving learning problems, hence to improve the performance of existing learning algorithms or to learn (induce) the learning algorithm itself, hence the alternative term learning to learn.
Solar vehicleA solar vehicle or solar electric vehicle is an electric vehicle powered completely or significantly by direct solar energy. Usually, photovoltaic (PV) cells contained in solar panels convert the sun's energy directly into electric energy. The term "solar vehicle" usually implies that solar energy is used to power all or part of a vehicle's propulsion. Solar power may also be used to provide power for communications or controls or other auxiliary functions.
Computational scienceComputational science, also known as scientific computing, technical computing or scientific computation (SC), is a division of science that uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and solve complex physical problems. This includes Algorithms (numerical and non-numerical): mathematical models, computational models, and computer simulations developed to solve sciences (e.
Ensemble learningIn statistics and machine learning, ensemble methods use multiple learning algorithms to obtain better predictive performance than could be obtained from any of the constituent learning algorithms alone. Unlike a statistical ensemble in statistical mechanics, which is usually infinite, a machine learning ensemble consists of only a concrete finite set of alternative models, but typically allows for much more flexible structure to exist among those alternatives.
Efficiency (statistics)In statistics, efficiency is a measure of quality of an estimator, of an experimental design, or of a hypothesis testing procedure. Essentially, a more efficient estimator needs fewer input data or observations than a less efficient one to achieve the Cramér–Rao bound. An efficient estimator is characterized by having the smallest possible variance, indicating that there is a small deviance between the estimated value and the "true" value in the L2 norm sense.
