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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

LLNL’s Brase discusses advances by ATOM in accelerating drug discovery pipeline

June 7, 2022 - 
The private-public Accelerating Therapeutic Opportunities in Medicine (ATOM) consortium is showing “significant” progress in demonstrating that HPC and M) tools can speed up the drug discovery process, said Jim Brase, ATOM co-lead and LLNL’s deputy associate director for data science. The consortium currently boasts more than a dozen member organizations, including national laboratories...

Kevin McLoughlin applies computational biology to complex problems

May 17, 2022 - 
Kevin McLoughlin has always been fascinated by the intersection of computing and biology. His LLNL career encompasses award-winning microbial detection technology, a COVID-19 antiviral drug design pipeline, and work with the ATOM consortium. The appeal for him in these projects lies at the intersection of computing and biology. “I love finding ways to visualize data that reveal relationships...

Accelerating the path to precision medicine

March 22, 2022 - 
LLNL joined the Transforming Research and Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury (TRACK-TBI) consortium in 2018. The national, multiyear, multidisciplinary effort, led by the University of California at San Francisco in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley and Argonne national laboratories and other leading research organizations and universities, combines neuroimaging, blood-based...