Data Science in the News

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Machine learning model finds COVID-19 risks for cancer patients

March 10, 2022 - 
A new study by researchers at LLNL and the University of California, San Francisco, looks to identify cancer-related risks for poor outcomes from COVID-19. Analyzing one of the largest databases of patients with cancer and COVID-19, the team found previously unreported links between a rare type of cancer—as well as two cancer treatment-related drugs—and an increased risk of hospitalization...

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...

LLNL team models COVID-19 disease progression and identifies risk factors

Feb. 15, 2022 - 
An LLNL team has developed a comprehensive dynamic model of COVID-19 disease progression in hospitalized patients, finding that risk factors for complications from the disease are dependent on the patient’s disease state. Using a machine learning algorithm on a dataset of electronic health records from more than 1,300 hospitalized COVID-19 patients with ProMedica — the largest health care...

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 joins Human Vaccines Project to accelerate vaccine development and understanding of immune response

Oct. 21, 2021 - 
LLNL has joined the international Human Vaccines Project (HVP), bringing Lab expertise and computing resources to the consortium to aid development of a universal coronavirus vaccine and improve understanding of immune response. The HVP is a nonprofit, public-private partnership with a mission to decode the human immune system and accelerate the development of vaccines and immunotherapies...

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...

Former interns share insights during career panel

Aug. 19, 2021 - 
The DSI’s new career panel series continued on August 10 with a session featuring former LLNL interns who converted to full-time employment at the Lab. Inspired by the annual Women in Data Science conference, the panel session was open to all LLNL staff and students. Moderator Mary Silva was joined by panelists from the Computing and Engineering Directorates: Brian Bartoldson, Jose Cadena...

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...

Brian Gallagher combines science with service

June 20, 2021 - 
Brian Gallagher works on applications of machine learning for a variety of science and national security questions. He’s also a group leader, student mentor, and the new director of LLNL’s Data Science Challenge. The Lab has enabled Gallagher to combine scientific pursuits with leadership positions and people-focused responsibilities. “For a long time, my primary motivation was learning new...

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...

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...

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...

'Self-trained' deep learning to improve disease diagnosis

March 4, 2021 - 
New work by computer scientists at LLNL and IBM Research on deep learning models to accurately diagnose diseases from X-ray images with less labeled data won the Best Paper award for Computer-Aided Diagnosis at the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference on February 19. The technique, which includes novel regularization and “self-training” strategies, addresses some well-known challenges in the...

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...