Data Science in the News

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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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Patent applies machine learning to industrial control systems

May 8, 2023 - 
An industrial control system (ICS) is an automated network of devices that make up a complex industrial process. For example, a large-scale electrical grid may contain thousands of instruments, sensors, and controls that transfer and distribute power, along with computing systems that capture data transmitted across these devices. Monitoring the ICS network for new device connections, device...

Skywing: Open-source software aids collaborative autonomy applications

Jan. 25, 2023 - 
A new software developed at LLNL, and known as Skywing, provides domain scientists working to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure with a high-reliability, real-time software platform for collaborative autonomy applications. The U.S. modern critical infrastructure—from the electrical grid that sends power to homes to the pipelines that deliver water and natural gas and the railways...

New HPC4EI project to create 'digital twin' models for aerospace manufacturing

Jan. 19, 2023 - 
A partnership involving LLNL aimed at developing “digital twins” for producing aerospace components is one of six new projects funded under the HPC for Energy Innovation (HPC4EI) initiative, the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy announced. Sponsored by the HPC4Manufacturing (HPC4Mfg) Program, one of the pillars of HPC4EI, the collaboration between LLNL...

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...

An open-source, data-science toolkit for energy: GridDS

Aug. 2, 2022 - 
As the number of smart meters and the demand for energy is expected to increase by 50% by 2050, so will the amount of data those smart meters produce. While energy standards have enabled large-scale data collection and storage, maximizing this data to mitigate costs and consumer demand has been an ongoing focus of energy research. An LLNL team has developed GridDS—an open-source, data-science...

Defending U.S. critical infrastructure from nation-state cyberattacks

July 21, 2022 - 
For many years, LLNL has been conducting research on cybersecurity, as well as defending its systems and networks from cyberattacks. The Lab has developed an array of capabilities to detect and defend against cyberintruders targeting IT networks and worked with government agencies and private-sector partners to share its cybersecurity knowledge to the wider cyberdefense community. LLNL has...

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...

Winter hackathon meets WiDS datathon

March 9, 2022 - 
Sponsored by the DSI, LLNL’s winter hackathon took place on February 16–17. Hackathons are 24-hour events that encourage collaborative programming and creative problem solving. In addition to traditional hacking, the hackathon included a special datathon competition in anticipation of the Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference on March 7. Hackathon and datathon participants presented their...

Career panel spotlights diversity, equity, and inclusion

Nov. 19, 2021 - 
The DSI’s career panel series continued on November 3 with a session highlighting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as well as the Lab’s DEI-focused employee resource groups (ERGs). ERGs are sponsored by LLNL’s Office of Strategic Diversity and Inclusion Programs. Moderator Anh Quach, member of the Asian Pacific American Council (APAC), was joined by four panelists: Raul Viera Mercado...

Building confidence in materials modeling using statistics

Oct. 31, 2021 - 
LLNL statisticians, computational modelers, and materials scientists have been developing a statistical framework for researchers to better assess the relationship between model uncertainties and experimental data. The Livermore-developed statistical framework is intended to assess sources of uncertainty in strength model input, recommend new experiments to reduce those sources of uncertainty...