Data Science in the News

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DOE honors seven early-career Lab scientists

Sept. 19, 2024 - 
Seven LLNL scientists are recipients of the DOE's Office of Science Early Career Research Program (ECRP) award. Among them is Shusen Liu, a computer scientist in the Machine Intelligence Group in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing. His work focuses on understanding and interpreting the inner mechanisms of neural networks and integrating human domain knowledge with machine...

LLNL, DOD, NNSA dedicate Rapid Response Laboratory and supercomputing system to accelerate biodefense

Aug. 15, 2024 - 
LLNL recently welcomed officials from the Department of Defense (DOD) and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to dedicate a new supercomputing system and Rapid Response Laboratory (RRL). DOD is working with NNSA to significantly increase the computing capability available to the national biodefense programs. The collaboration has enabled expanding systems of the same architecture...

Probing carbon capture, atom-by-atom

July 31, 2024 - 
A team of scientists at LLNL has developed a machine-learning model to gain an atomic-level understanding of CO2 capture in amine-based sorbents. This innovative approach promises to enhance the efficiency of direct air capture (DAC) technologies, which are crucial for reducing the excessive amounts of CO2 already present in the atmosphere. The low cost of these sorbents has enabled several...

ISCP projects make machine learning advantages tangible

July 17, 2024 - 
Data science tools are not only rapidly taking hold across disciplines, they are constantly evolving. The applications, services, and techniques one cohort of scientists and engineers may have learned could be out of date by the next cohort, especially as machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools become commonplace. To keep employees abreast of the latest tools, two data...

The surprising places you’ll find machine learning (VIDEO)

June 20, 2024 - 
LLNL data scientists are applying ML to real-world applications on multiple scales. A new DSI-funded video highlights research at the nanoscale (developing better water treatment methods by predicting the behavior of water molecules under the extremely confined conditions of nanotubes); mesoscale (determining the likelihood and location of a dangerous wildfire-causing phenomenon called arcing...

LLNL and BridgeBio announce trials for supercomputing-discovered cancer drug

June 6, 2024 - 
In a substantial milestone for supercomputing-aided drug design, LLNL and BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics (BridgeBio) today announced clinical trials have begun for a first-in-class medication that targets specific genetic mutations implicated in many types of cancer. The development of the new drug—BBO-8520—is the result of collaboration among LLNL, BridgeBio and the National Cancer...

Statistical framework synchronizes medical study data

June 3, 2024 - 
The risks and benefits of heart surgery, chemotherapy, vaccination, and other medical treatments can change based on the time of day they are administered. These variations arise in part due to changes in gene expression levels throughout the 24-hour day-night cycle, with around 50% of genes displaying oscillatory behavior. To evaluate new therapies, investigators study how a gene’s...

Welcome new DSI team members

April 2, 2024 - 
When Data Science Institute (DSI) director Brian Giera and deputy director Cindy Gonzales began planning activities for fiscal year 2024 and beyond, they immediately realized that LLNL’s growth in data science and artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) research requires corresponding growth in the DSI’s efforts. “Our field is booming,” Giera states. “The Lab has a stake in the...

Machine learning tool fills in the blanks for satellite light curves

Feb. 13, 2024 - 
When viewed from Earth, objects in space are seen at a specific brightness, called apparent magnitude. Over time, ground-based telescopes can track a specific object’s change in brightness. This time-dependent magnitude variation is known as an object’s light curve, and can allow astronomers to infer the object’s size, shape, material, location, and more. Monitoring the light curve of...

Conference paper illuminates neural image compression

Dec. 8, 2023 - 
An enduring question in machine learning (ML) concerns performance: How do we know if a model produces reliable results? The best models have explainable logic and can withstand data perturbations, but performance analysis tools and datasets that will help researchers meaningfully evaluate these models are scarce. A team from LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) is teasing...

Lab partners with new Space Force Lab

Nov. 14, 2023 - 
LLNL subject matter experts have been selected by the U.S. Space Force to help stand up its newest Tools, Applications, and Processing (TAP) laboratory dedicated to advancing military space domain awareness (SDA). The Livermore team attended the October 26 kickoff in Colorado Springs of the SDA TAP lab’s Project Apollo technology accelerator, designed with an open framework to support and...

Data Science Summer Institute hosts student interns from Japan

Oct. 13, 2023 - 
The Data Science Summer Institute (DSSI) hosted summer student interns from Japan on-site for the first time, where the students worked with Lab mentors on real-world projects in AI-assisted bio-surveillance and automated 3D printing. From June to September, the three students—Raiki Yoshimura, Shinnosuke Sawano and Taisei Saida—lived in rental apartments near the Lab and worked at the Lab on...

UC Merced & UC Riverside tackle Data Science Challenge on ML-assisted heart modeling

Aug. 3, 2023 - 
For the first time, students from the University of California (UC) Merced and UC Riverside joined forces for the two-week Data Science Challenge (DSC) at LLNL, tackling a real-world problem in machine learning (ML)-assisted heart modeling. Held in the Livermore Valley Open Campus’s newly remodeled University of California Livermore Collaboration Center from July 10-21, the event brought...

Consulting service infuses Lab projects with data science expertise

June 5, 2023 - 
A key advantage of LLNL’s culture of multidisciplinary teamwork is that domain scientists don’t need to be experts in everything. Physicists, chemists, biologists, materials engineers, climate scientists, computer scientists, and other researchers regularly work alongside specialists in other fields to tackle challenging problems. The rise of Big Data across the Lab has led to a demand for...

Celebrating the DSI’s first five years

May 18, 2023 - 
View the LLNL Flickr album Data Science Institute Turns Five. Data science—a field combining technical disciplines such as computer science, statistics, mathematics, software development, domain science, and more—has become a crucial part of how LLNL carries out its mission. Since the DSI’s founding in 2018, the Lab has seen tremendous growth in its data science community and has invested...

Computing codes, simulations helped make ignition possible

April 6, 2023 - 
Harkening back to the genesis of LLNL’s inertial confinement fusion (ICF) program, codes have played an essential role in simulating the complex physical processes that take place in an ICF target and the facets of each experiment that must be nearly perfect. Many of these processes are too complicated, expensive, or even impossible to predict through experiments alone. With only a few...

National Ignition Facility achieves fusion ignition

Dec. 13, 2022 - 
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced the achievement of fusion ignition at LLNL—a major scientific breakthrough decades in the making that will pave the way for advancements in national defense and the future of clean power. On Dec. 5, a team at LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) conducted the first controlled...

LLNL researchers win HPCwire award for applying cognitive simulation to ICF

Nov. 17, 2022 - 
The high performance computing publication HPCwire announced LLNL as the winner of its Editor’s Choice award for Best Use of HPC in Energy for applying cognitive simulation (CogSim) methods to inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research. The award was presented at the largest supercomputing conference in the world: the 2022 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking...

Understanding the universe with applied statistics (VIDEO)

Nov. 17, 2022 - 
In a new video posted to the Lab’s YouTube channel, statistician Amanda Muyskens describes MuyGPs, her team’s innovative and computationally efficient Gaussian Process hyperparameter estimation method for large data. The method has been applied to space-based image classification and released for open-source use in the Python package MuyGPyS. MuyGPs will help astronomers and astrophysicists...

ESGF launches effort to upgrade climate projection data system

Oct. 5, 2022 - 
The Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF), a multi-agency initiative that gathers and distributes data for top-tier projections of the Earth’s climate, is preparing a series of upgrades that will make using the data easier and faster while improving how the information is curated. The federation, led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in collaboration with Argonne and...