Sustainable urban water management is crucial for meeting the growing demands of urban populations. This study presents a novel approach that combines time series clustering, seasonal analysis, and entropy analysis to uncover residential water consumption patterns and their drivers. Using a three-year dataset from the SmartH2o project, encompassing 374 households, we identify nine distinct water consumption patterns through time series clustering, leveraging Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) as the optimal similarity measure. Multiple linear regression reveals key household characteristics influencing water usage behaviors, such as the number of bathrooms and appliance efficiency ratings. Seasonal analysis uncovers temporal dynamics, highlighting shifts towards lower consumption during summer months and increased variability in transitional seasons. Entropy analysis quantifies the diversity and complexity of water consumption at both cluster and household levels, informing targeted interventions. This comprehensive, granular approach enables the development of personalized water conservation strategies and policies, empowering water utilities to optimize resource management and contribute to sustainable urban water practices.

Wind power prediction is a challenging task due to the high variability and uncertainty of wind generation and weather conditions. Accurate and timely wind power prediction is essential for optimal power system operation and planning. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Expert Fusion Model (EFM+) for online wind power prediction. EFM+ is an innovative ensemble model that integrates the strengths of XGBoost and self-attention LSTM models using dynamic weights. EFM+ can adapt to real-time changes in wind conditions and data distribution by updating the weights based on the performance and error of the models on recent similar samples. EFM+ enables Bayesian inference and real-time uncertainty updates with new data. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world wind farm dataset to evaluate EFM+. The results show that EFM+ outperforms existing models in prediction accuracy and error, and demonstrates high robustness and stability across various scenarios. We also conduct sensitivity and ablation analyses to assess the effects of different components and parameters on EFM+. EFM+ is a promising technique for online wind power prediction that can handle nonstationarity and uncertainty in wind power generation.

Prediction of icing on wind turbine blades is crucial, particularly in high-latitude areas where ice accumulation is a frequent occurrence. Traditional centralized data-driven approaches for predicting blade icing have demonstrated promising performance, but they require a large amount of storage and computational resources and may also raise concerns about data privacy. Federated Learning (FL) presents a potential solution to address these issues. These challenges include redundant features in the collected data, a highly imbalanced data distribution between normal and icing samples, and slow model convergence during FL training. To tackle these challenges, we proposed a novel FL model called FedBIP. FedBIP employs a feature selection approach enhanced with human knowledge to select relevant features, a segmentation-based oversampling method to alleviate class imbalance, and a new aggregation method that takes into account data size, timestamps, and offsets of each participating client. In addition, knowledge distillation is employed in the local model training to accelerate model convergence and speed up the overall training process. The results of comprehensive experiments demonstrate that FedBIP outperforms state-of-the-art FL methods, aggregation methods, and feature extractors. Ablation and sensitivity analysis were also conducted to validate the importance of each component and key parameters in FedBIP.

Latent fingerprints are among the most important and widely used evidence in crime scenes, digital forensics and law enforcement worldwide. Despite the number of advancements reported in recent works, we note that significant open issues such as independent benchmarking and lack of large-scale evaluation databases for improving the algorithms are inadequately addressed. The available databases are mostly of semi-public nature, lack of acquisition in the wild environment, and post-processing pipelines. Moreover, they do not represent a realistic capture scenario similar to real crime scenes, to benchmark the robustness of the algorithms. Further, existing databases for latent fingerprint recognition do not have a large number of unique subjects/fingerprint instances or do not provide ground truth/reference fingerprint images to conduct a cross-comparison against the latent. In this paper, we introduce a new wild large-scale latent fingerprint database that includes five different acquisition scenarios: reference fingerprints from (1) optical and (2) capacitive sensors, (3) smartphone fingerprints, latent fingerprints captured from (4) wall surface, (5) Ipad surface, and (6) aluminium foil surface. The new database consists of 1,318 unique fingerprint instances captured in all above mentioned settings. A total of 2,636 reference fingerprints from optical and capacitive sensors, 1,318 fingerphotos from smartphones, and 9,224 latent fingerprints from each of the 132 subjects were provided in this work. The dataset is constructed considering various age groups, equal representations of genders and backgrounds. In addition, we provide an extensive set of analysis of various subset evaluations to highlight open challenges for future directions in latent fingerprint recognition research.

Blade icing detection is vital for wind turbines in cold climates, as it can prevent revenue loss and power degradation. Many machine learning models have been proposed to improve the detection of blade icing; however, earlier studies do not adequately address these issues due to the dynamics of sensor correlations and the imbalance of blade icing data, resulting in low precision and a high false alarm rate. In this study, we aim to address both of these challenges in order to identify blade icing more accurately. On this premise, we develop a spatial–temporal graph convolutional network (SGCN) that leverages the graph convolutional network for adaptively analyzing the dynamics of sensor correlations and a distance-based classifier to improve imbalanced learning. Experiments on the public UEA time series classification datasets and the real-world wind turbine datasets indicate that SGCN is capable of state-of-the-art accuracy, especially in the case of extremely imbalanced data.

Deep learning techniques have been widely used for semantic change detection (SCD) of remote sensing images (RSIs) and have shown encouraging performance. In this paper, we propose a novel neural network by embedding the difference enhancement (DE) module into the adjacent layers of ResNet for SCD of RSIs (DESNet), which can pay more attention to the changes of bi-temporal RSIs. Furthermore, we deploy the module of multi-scale parallel sampling spatial-spectral non-local (SSN) after feature extraction, which can effectively improve the robustness to large-scale changes and the integrity of the changed objects by fusing global features that sampled from the multi-scale feature space. The experimental tests demonstrate that our DESNet can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on the SECOND dataset and the LandSat-SCD dataset.