This paper describes the application of machine learning in an energy management system set up to monitor the use and generation of energy at a university campus. We explain how we built precise forecasting models for producing photovoltaic energy produced by solar panels at the University of Applied Sciences Landshut, Germany. We describe the practical challenges of dealing with data dropout and erroneous data when working with data from an actual in-production setting outside a simple lab scenario. Applying several data cleaning methods based on statistical methods, we obtained models that allow us to predict electrical energy produced by the solar panels with a precision of 0.97 as measured by the R2metric. More importantly, the process described to arrive at this result, more than the result per se, serves as a real-world example of applying data science and machine learning methodology in an in-production setting.

In 2017, WebAssembly, a portable low-level byte-code, was released by the four major web browser makers to address the challenges presented by the maturation of the web and the rise of sophisticated and interactive applications such as 3D visualization, audio, and video streaming, and online games. JavaScript heretofore was the only built-in language of the web, and unfortunately, it is not well outfitted for the rich applications that have come to dominate the web today. Since its initial release, WebAssembly has made great strides on the web. With the WebAssembly System Interface release in March 2018, which allows WebAssembly to communicate with the operating system, it has become possible to run WebAssembly applications outside web browsers. This paper reviews the current state of WebAssembly and its system interface, describes the costs and benefits of these technologies for applications in different environments, and evaluates performance and portability. Our performance measurements demonstrate that WebAssembly is generally faster than JavaScript and, in some cases, can approach native code performance. Despite its limitations which make WebAssembly useless for specific applications domains, it nevertheless, has the potential to be beneficial in many environments and is likely to grow further even outside its original web environment.