Data Science in the News

Did you know we have a monthly newsletter? View past volumes and subscribe.

Predicting climate change impacts on infrastructure (VIDEO)

Feb. 26, 2024 - 
At LLNL, electrical grid experts and climate scientists work together to bridge the gap between infrastructure and climate modeling. By taking weather variables such as wildfire, flooding, wind, and sunlight that directly impact the electrical grid into consideration, researchers can improve electrical grid model projections for a more stable future. In a new video, LLNL computer scientist...

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...

Making machine learning safer for biomedicine

Aug. 15, 2023 - 
It’s hard to understate the impact machine learning will have on biomedicine. The ability to train computers to spot patterns by analyzing large, complex datasets is driving discoveries in heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases and more. For instance, Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) has used machine learning to aid cancer research and accelerate COVID-19 antiviral discovery. One...

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...

High-performance computing, AI and cognitive simulation helped LLNL conquer fusion ignition

June 21, 2023 - 
For hundreds of LLNL scientists on the design, experimental, and modeling and simulation teams behind inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments at the National Ignition Facility, the results of the now-famous Dec. 5, 2022, ignition shot didn’t come as a complete surprise. The “crystal ball” that gave them increased pre-shot confidence in a breakthrough involved a combination of detailed...

Visionary report unveils ambitious roadmap to harness the power of AI in scientific discovery

June 12, 2023 - 
A new report, the product of a series of workshops held in 2022 under the guidance of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, lays out a comprehensive vision for the Office of Science and NNSA to expand their work in scientific use of AI by building on existing strengths in world-leading high performance computing systems and data...

Data science meets fusion (VIDEO)

May 30, 2023 - 
LLNL’s historic fusion ignition achievement on December 5, 2022, was the first experiment to ever achieve net energy gain from nuclear fusion. However, the experiment’s result was not actually that surprising. A team leveraging data science techniques developed and used a landmark system for teaching artificial intelligence (AI) to incorporate and better account for different variables and...

LLNL and SambaNova Systems announce additional AI hardware to support Lab’s cognitive simulation efforts

May 23, 2023 - 
LLNL and SambaNova Systems have announced the addition of a spatial data flow accelerator into the Livermore Computing Center, part of an effort to upgrade the Lab’s CogSim program. LLNL will integrate the new hardware to further investigate CogSim approaches combining AI with high-performance computing—and how deep neural network hardware architectures can accelerate traditional physics...

Scientists develop model for more efficient simulations of protein interactions linked to cancer

March 28, 2023 - 
LLNL scientists have developed a theoretical model for more efficient molecular-level simulations of cell membranes and their lipid-protein interactions, part of a multi-institutional effort to better understand the behavior of cancer-causing membrane proteins. Developed under an ongoing collaboration by the Department of Energy and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) aimed at modeling cell...

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...

Supercomputing’s critical role in the fusion ignition breakthrough

Dec. 21, 2022 - 
On December 5th, the research team at LLNL's National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved a historic win in energy science: for the first time ever, more energy was produced by an artificial fusion reaction than was consumed—3.15 megajoules produced versus 2.05 megajoules in laser energy to cause the reaction. High-performance computing was key to this breakthrough (called ignition), and HPCwire...

LLNL staff returns to Texas-sized Supercomputing Conference

Nov. 23, 2022 - 
The 2022 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22) returned to Dallas as a large contingent of LLNL staff participated in sessions, panels, paper presentations, and workshops centered around HPC. The world’s largest conference of its kind celebrated its highest in-person attendance since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with about 11...

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...

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...

Scientific discovery for stockpile stewardship

Sept. 27, 2022 - 
Among the significant scientific discoveries that have helped ensure the reliability of the nation’s nuclear stockpile is the advancement of cognitive simulation. In cognitive simulation, researchers are developing AI/ML algorithms and software to retrain part of this model on the experimental data itself. The result is a model that “knows the best of both worlds,” says Brian Spears, a...

LLNL cancer research goes exascale

July 20, 2022 - 
An LLNL team will be among the first researchers to perform work on the world’s first exascale supercomputer—Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier—when they use the system to model cancer-causing protein mutations. Led by Harsh Bhatia, a computer scientist in the Center of Applied Computing at LLNL, the team was awarded limited access to Frontier under the DOE's Advanced Scientific...

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...

Introduction to deep learning for image classification workshop (VIDEO)

July 6, 2022 - 
In addition to its annual conference held every March, the global Women in Data Science (WiDS) organization hosts workshops and other activities year-round to inspire and educate data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and to support women in the field. On June 29, LLNL’s Cindy Gonzales led a WiDS Workshop titled “Introduction to Deep Learning for Image Classification.” The abstract...

Assured and robust…or bust

June 30, 2022 - 
The consequences of a machine learning (ML) error that presents irrelevant advertisements to a group of social media users may seem relatively minor. However, this opacity, combined with the fact that ML systems are nascent and imperfect, makes trusting their accuracy difficult in mission-critical situations, such as recognizing life-or-death risks to military personnel or advancing materials...

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...