Data Science in the News

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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...

LLNL’s Kailkhura elevated to IEEE senior member

Nov. 8, 2023 - 
IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization, has elevated LLNL research staff member Bhavya Kailkhura to the grade of senior member within the organization. IEEE has more than 427,000 members in more than 190 countries, including engineers, scientists and allied professionals in the electrical and computer sciences, engineering and related disciplines. Just 10% of IEEE’s...

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...

Heart smart: Future engineers tackle real-world cardiology concerns at LLNL's Data Science Challenge

Aug. 30, 2023 - 
It’s a quick and pain-free way to test for heart problems. That’s why the electrocardiogram is so often used by doctors—with just a few electrodes and wires, the heart’s electrical activity can be measured and interpreted to identify irregularities and disease. But while it is a highly useful and commonly used diagnostic tool, there are limits to the types of information an electrocardiogram...

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...

Explainable artificial intelligence can enhance scientific workflows

July 25, 2023 - 
As ML and AI tools become more widespread, a team of researchers in LLNL’s Computing and Physical and Life Sciences directorates are trying to provide a reasonable starting place for scientists who want to apply ML/AI, but don’t have the appropriate background. The team’s work grew out of a Laboratory Directed Research and Development project on feedstock materials optimization, which led to...

Data Science Challenge offers students learning and growth opportunities

July 24, 2023 - 
About 20 UC Merced students spent the past two weeks working at LLNL to see if they can solve a problem that could have a significant impact on cardiology. The annual Data Science Challenge (DSC), a two-week, full-time internship at LLNL, this year teamed students from Merced and UC Riverside. They attempted to see if machine learning could address a gap in the information provided by the...

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...

Cognitive simulation supercharges scientific research

Jan. 10, 2023 - 
Computer modeling has been essential to scientific research for more than half a century—since the advent of computers sufficiently powerful to handle modeling’s computational load. Models simulate natural phenomena to aid scientists in understanding their underlying principles. Yet, while the most complex models running on supercomputers may contain millions of lines of code and generate...

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...

LLNL team claims top AI award at international symbolic regression competition

Aug. 16, 2022 - 
An LLNL team claimed a top prize at an inaugural international symbolic regression competition for an artificial intelligence (AI) framework they developed capable of explaining and interpreting real-life COVID-19 data. Hosted by the open source SRBench project at the 2022 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), the competition had two tracks—synthetic and real-world—and...

Lab researchers win top award for machine learning-based approach to ICF experiments

Aug. 4, 2022 - 
The IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society (NPSS) announced an LLNL team as the winner of its 2022 Transactions on Plasma Science Best Paper Award for their work applying machine learning to inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments. In the paper, lead author Kelli Humbird and co-authors propose a novel technique for calibrating ICF experiments by combining machine learning with...

Panel discussion spotlights COVID-19 R&D

July 19, 2022 - 
The DSI’s career panel series continued on June 28 to highlight some of LLNL’s COVID-19 research projects. Three data scientists—Emilia Grzesiak, Derek Jones, and Priyadip Ray—joined moderator and data scientist Stewart He to talk about their work in drug screening, protein–drug compounds, antibody–antigen sequence analysis, and risk factor identification. He, who earned a PhD in Computer...

UC Merced students work with LLNL mentors on potential new drugs to combat COVID-19

June 30, 2022 - 
Students from the University of California, Merced worked with mentors at LLNL to identify drug compounds that could be used to treat COVID-19 during a two-week Data Science Challenge (DSC) that concluded on June 6. For the first time in the DSC series since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, Lab mentors visited the college campus to provide in-person guidance for five teams of UC Merced...