Passive solar building designIn passive solar building design, windows, walls, and floors are made to collect, store, reflect, and distribute solar energy, in the form of heat in the winter and reject solar heat in the summer. This is called passive solar design because, unlike active solar heating systems, it does not involve the use of mechanical and electrical devices. The key to designing a passive solar building is to best take advantage of the local climate performing an accurate site analysis.
Google DeepMindDeepMind Technologies Limited, doing business as Google DeepMind, is a British-American artificial intelligence research laboratory which serves as a subsidiary of Google. Founded in the UK in 2010, it was acquired by Google in 2014, becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet Inc. after Google's corporate restructuring in 2015. The company is based in London, with research centres in Canada, France, and the United States.
Q-learningQ-learning is a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm to learn the value of an action in a particular state. It does not require a model of the environment (hence "model-free"), and it can handle problems with stochastic transitions and rewards without requiring adaptations. For any finite Markov decision process (FMDP), Q-learning finds an optimal policy in the sense of maximizing the expected value of the total reward over any and all successive steps, starting from the current state.
EngineeringEngineering is the practice of using natural science, mathematics, and the engineering design process to solve problems, increase efficiency and productivity, and improve systems. Modern engineering comprises many subfields which include designing and creating infrastructure, machinery, vehicles, electronics, materials, and energy. The discipline of engineering encompasses a broad range of more specialized fields of engineering, each with a more specific emphasis on particular areas of applied mathematics, applied science, and types of application.
Ocean thermal energy conversionOcean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) uses the ocean thermal gradient between cooler deep and warmer shallow or surface seawaters to run a heat engine and produce useful work, usually in the form of electricity. OTEC can operate with a very high capacity factor and so can operate in base load mode. The denser cold water masses, formed by ocean surface water interaction with cold atmosphere in quite specific areas of the North Atlantic and the Southern Ocean, sink into the deep sea basins and spread in entire deep ocean by the thermohaline circulation.
Self-playSelf-play is a technique for improving the performance of reinforcement learning agents. Intuitively, agents learn to improve their performance by playing "against themselves". In multi-agent reinforcement learning experiments, researchers try to optimize the performance of a learning agent on a given task, in cooperation or competition with one or more agents. These agents learn by trial-and-error, and researchers may choose to have the learning algorithm play the role of two or more of the different agents.
Machine learningMachine learning (ML) is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines 'discover' their 'own' algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. Recently, generative artificial neural networks have been able to surpass results of many previous approaches.
Green buildingGreen building (also known as green construction or sustainable building) refers to both a structure and the application of processes that are environmentally responsible and resource-efficient throughout a building's life-cycle: from planning to design, construction, operation, maintenance, renovation, and demolition. This requires close cooperation of the contractor, the architects, the engineers, and the client at all project stages. The Green Building practice expands and complements the classical building design concerns of economy, utility, durability, and comfort.
Thermal radiationThermal radiation is electromagnetic radiation generated by the thermal motion of particles in matter. Thermal radiation is generated when heat from the movement of charges in the material (electrons and protons in common forms of matter) is converted to electromagnetic radiation. All matter with a temperature greater than absolute zero emits thermal radiation. At room temperature, most of the emission is in the infrared (IR) spectrum. Particle motion results in charge-acceleration or dipole oscillation which produces electromagnetic radiation.
Thermal energy storageThermal energy storage (TES) is achieved with widely different technologies. Depending on the specific technology, it allows excess thermal energy to be stored and used hours, days, months later, at scales ranging from the individual process, building, multiuser-building, district, town, or region. Usage examples are the balancing of energy demand between daytime and nighttime, storing summer heat for winter heating, or winter cold for summer air conditioning (Seasonal thermal energy storage).
