Latest news with #MeganStanley
Yahoo
21-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
School pupils join Salisbury Journal and other businesses as part of enterprise event
Pupils from South Wilts Grammar School joined businesses across Salisbury as part of their Enterprise Day 2025. The event saw year 9 students collaborating with 15 businesses to tackle real-world challenges. Each company set a unique task, ranging from helping a local estate agent to supporting a window company. Read more Third of UK's dyslexia-friendly schools are in Wiltshire School's inaugural sports awards evening a huge success with Paralympian guest New SEND school to open including 120 new spaces for pupils Businesses taking part included Salisbury District Hospital, Girl Guides, Boots, Salisbury Museum, and Wessex Timber. On Wednesday, July 9, eight pupils from the school joined the Salisbury Journal. Working with digital audience and content editor, Megan Stanley, the students were tasked with writing news stories for the paper. After a brief presentation about the newspaper and how to write a news article, the pupils brainstormed ideas. The presentation by the pupils from SWGS (Image: Newsquest) They decided to cover the following topics: Shrek The Musical at Salisbury Playhouse, tourism and inflation. As part of their work, the group went out to interview business owners, tourists and residents of Salisbury in the city centre. They also interviewed another pupil who had starred in the musical. On Friday, July 11, the groups presented their work to a panel of businesses, including the Salisbury Journal. Head of Business and Economics, Mrs Georgina Byrne said: "Students embraced the opportunity with enthusiasm, enjoying the chance to visit local businesses, engage with professionals, and present their creative solutions. The experience was both educational and inspiring, giving students a valuable insight into the world of work and enterprise. "We extend our heartfelt thanks to all the businesses who generously gave their time and expertise to support this initiative. "As a school, we are always keen to build new partnerships and welcome interest from local companies who would like to be involved in future events."
Indian Express
25-05-2025
- Science
- Indian Express
Microsoft's AI model Aurora can now predict air quality at high speed and precision
Microsoft's foundational AI model for weather forecasting has been upgraded and can now accurately predict air quality as well. Aurora has been developed by Microsoft Research to forecast a range of weather-related phenomena such as hurricanes, typhoons, etc, with greater precision and speed than traditional meteorological methods, the company said in a blog post earlier this week. It has also published a research paper on Aurora in science journal Nature. Microsoft further said that Aurora's source code and model weights are now publicly available. A specialised version of the model that produces hourly forecasts, including for clouds, has been integrated into the MSN Weather app. The Windows maker has claimed that Aurora is one of the top-performing AI models in the field of weather forecasting. 'What sets Aurora apart is that it is originally trained as a foundation model and can then be specialized through finetuning to go beyond what is considered traditional weather forecasting, such as air pollution prediction,' Microsoft said. 'Because the model first learns from a large and diverse set of data, it can be fine-tuned with smaller amounts of air quality data,' it added. Aurora has been trained on over a million hours of data captured by satellites, radar and weather stations as well as past weather simulations and forecasts, the company said. The AI model can be fine-tuned using additional data to provide forecasts about specific weather events. Its underlying encoder architecture helps to translate massive amounts of data drawn from multiple sources into a standard format that the AI model uses to make predictions. 'We're not putting in strict rules about how we think variables should interact with each other. We're just giving a large deep-learning model the option to learn whatever is most useful. This is the power of deep learning in these kind of simulation problems,' Megan Stanley, a senior researcher with Microsoft Research, said. Microsoft claimed that its Aurora AI model accurately predicted the landfall of Typhoon Doksuri in Philippines four days in advance and better than some expert predictions. The model also successfully predicted a sandstorm in Iraq two years ago. It beat the US National Hurricane Center by providing accurate five-day forecasts of tropical cyclone paths in 2022 and 2023, as per the company. Aurora, which draws compute power from graphics processing units (GPUs), provides weather forecasts in seconds compared to hourly predictions by traditional weather systems running on supercomputers. While the initial cost involved in training Aurora was high, Microsoft said its operational expenses are lower than traditional weather forecast systems. AI weather models like Aurora are not entirely new. Over the past few years, Google DeepMind has released several AI models designed for weather forecasting such as WeatherNext.
