Data Science in the News

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WiDS Livermore returns on March 7

Feb. 10, 2022 - 
We are hosting our 5th WiDS Livermore regional event to encourage our community of women in computing. We will watch the WiDS Stanford Livestream as well as feature Lab-focused technical talks, mentoring breakout sessions, and a career panel. WiDS Livermore is an independent event hosted by LLNL Ambassadors as part of the annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) Worldwide conference organized by...

LLNL-led team uses machine learning to derive black hole motion from gravitational waves

Nov. 9, 2021 - 
To understand the motion of binary black holes, researchers have traditionally simplified Einstein’s field equations and solved them to calculate the emitted gravitational waves. The approach is complex and requires expensive, time-consuming simulations on supercomputers or approximation techniques that can lead to errors or break down when applied to more complicated black hole systems. Alo...

Summer scholar develops data-driven approaches to key NIF diagnostics

Oct. 20, 2021 - 
Su-Ann Chong's summer project, “A Data-Driven Approach Towards NIF Neutron Time-of-Flight Diagnostics Using Machine Learning and Bayesian Inference,” is aimed at presenting a different take on nToF diagnostics. Neutron time-of-flight diagnostics are an essential tool to diagnose the implosion dynamics of inertial confinement fusion experiments at NIF, the world’s largest and most energetic...

Tackling the COVID-19 pandemic

Oct. 11, 2021 - 
To help the U.S. fight the COVID-19 pandemic, LLNL did what it does best: quickly bring together interdisciplinary teams and diverse technologies to address urgent national challenges. This effort includes applying advanced high-performance computing resources to biological research and anayzing complicated computer models and enormous datasets. Read more in Science & Technology Review.

Data Science Challenge welcomes UC Riverside

Oct. 11, 2021 - 
Together with LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC), the DSI welcomed a new academic partner to the 2021 Data Science Challenge (DSC) internship program: the University of California (UC) Riverside campus. The intensive program has run for three years with UC Merced, and it tasks undergraduate and graduate students with addressing a real-world scientific problem using data...

New machine-learning tactic sharpens NIF shot predictions

July 8, 2021 - 
Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments at LLNL's National Ignition Facility (NIF) are extremely complex and costly, and it is challenging to accurately and consistently predict the outcome. But that is now changing, thanks to the work of design physicists. In a paper recently published in Physics of Plasmas, design physicist Kelli Humbird and her colleagues describe a new machine...

Career panel series kicks off with women in Computing leadership roles

July 6, 2021 - 
More than 100 LLNL staff and students gathered virtually for the first session of a new career panel series inspired by the annual WiDS conference and sponsored by the DSI. Panelists discussed how they have shaped their careers at the Lab and in Computing, their journeys into leadership roles, and how they navigate career challenges. Data scientist and panel series organizer Cindy Gonzales...

Virtual LLNL-UC Merced Data Science Challenge tackles asteroid detection though machine learning

June 25, 2021 - 
Over three weeks, students from the University of California, Merced collaborated online with mentors at LLNL to tackle a real-world challenge problem: using machine learning to identify potentially hazardous asteroids that could pose an existential threat to humanity. Throughout the event, the teams tackled problems around the theme of “Astronomy for Planetary Defense.” For the main...

COVID-19 detection and analysis with Nisha Mulakken (VIDEO)

June 7, 2021 - 
LLNL biostatistician Nisha Mulakken has enhanced the Lawrence Livermore Microbial Detection Array (LLMDA) system with detection capability for all variants of SARS-CoV-2. The technology detects a broad range of organisms—viruses, bacteria, archaea, protozoa, and fungi—and has demonstrated novel species identification for human health, animal health, biodefense, and environmental sampling...

Laser-driven ion acceleration with deep learning

May 25, 2021 - 
While advances in machine learning over the past decade have made significant impacts in applications such as image classification, natural language processing and pattern recognition, scientific endeavors have only just begun to leverage this technology. This is most notable in processing large quantities of data from experiments. Research conducted at LLNL is the first to apply neural...

The data-driven future of extreme physics

May 19, 2021 - 
By applying modern machine learning and data science methods to “extreme” plasma physics, researchers can gain insight into our universe and find clues about creating a limitless amount of energy. In a recent perspective published in Nature, LLNL scientists and international collaborators outline key challenges and future directions in using machine learning and other data-driven techniques...

A winning strategy for deep neural networks

April 29, 2021 - 
LLNL continues to make an impact at top machine learning conferences, even as much of the research staff works remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Postdoctoral researcher James Diffenderfer and computer scientist Bhavya Kailkhura, both from LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing, are co-authors on a paper—“Multi-Prize Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Accurate Binary Neural...

Virtual seminar series explores data-driven physical simulations

April 6, 2021 - 
The rapidly growing fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become cornerstones of LLNL’s data science research activities. The Lab’s scientific community regularly publishes advancements in both AI/ML applications and theory, contributing to international discourse on the possibilities of these compelling technologies. The large volume of AI/ML scientific...

COVID-19 HPC Consortium reflects on past year

April 1, 2021 - 
COVID-19 HPC Consortium scientists and stakeholders met virtually on March 23 to mark the consortium’s one-year anniversary, discussing the progress of research projects and the need to pursue a broader organization to mobilize supercomputing access for future crises. The White House announced the launch of the public-private consortium, which provides COVID-19 researchers with free access to...

Winter hackathon highlights data science talks and tutorial

March 24, 2021 - 
The Data Science Institute (DSI) sponsored LLNL’s 27th hackathon on February 11–12. Held four times a year, these seasonal events bring the computing community together for a 24-hour period where anything goes: Participants can focus on special projects, learn new programming languages, develop skills, dig into challenging tasks, and more. The winter hackathon was the DSI’s second such...

Novel deep learning framework for symbolic regression

March 18, 2021 - 
LLNL computer scientists have developed a new framework and an accompanying visualization tool that leverages deep reinforcement learning for symbolic regression problems, outperforming baseline methods on benchmark problems. The paper was recently accepted as an oral presentation at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2021), one of the top machine learning...

Lab event encourages growth of women in data science

March 17, 2021 - 
Coinciding with International Women’s Day on March 8, LLNL’s 4th Women in Data Science (WiDS) regional event brought women together to discuss successes, opportunities and challenges of being female in a mostly male field. The Lab’s first-ever virtual WiDS gathering attracted dozens of LLNL data scientists as well as some from outside the Lab, and featured speakers, a career panel and...

CASC research in machine learning robustness debuts at AAAI conference

Feb. 10, 2021 - 
LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) has steadily grown its reputation in the artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) community—a trend continued by three papers accepted at the 35th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, held virtually on February 2–9, 2021. Computer scientists Jayaraman Thiagarajan, Rushil Anirudh, Bhavya Kailkhura, and Peer-Timo Bremer led...

LLNL physicist wins Young Former Student award

Dec. 16, 2020 - 
Texas A&M University’s Department of Nuclear Engineering on December 10 announced it has honored LLNL physicist Kelli Humbird with its 2020-21 Young Former Student award for her work at LLNL in combining machine learning with inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research. Humbird graduated from Texas A&M with a PhD in nuclear engineering in 2019. Since joining the Laboratory as an intern in 2016...

NeurIPS papers aim to improve understanding and robustness of machine learning algorithms

Dec. 7, 2020 - 
The 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) is featuring two papers advancing the reliability of deep learning for mission-critical applications at LLNL. The most prestigious machine learning conference in the world, NeurIPS began virtually on Dec. 6. The first paper describes a framework for understanding the effect of properties of training data on the...