Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “random networks”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 451 records · Page 25
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Graph Representation Learning for Dengue Forecasting

In 2017, the largest recorded dengue outbreak in Sri Lanka’s history occurred. Since then, dengue has continued to threaten national health across Sri Lanka. The development of an effective Early Warning System (EWS) for dengue outbreaks is essential for Sri Lanka’s Ministry of Health to take preventative measures. We propose the use of Graph Neural Networks as EWS. Using earth observational data from NASAs global satellites and dengue incidence data from Sri Lanka s Ministry of Health, we developed a series of traditional and graph representation EWS to forecast Dengue cases across Sri Lanka’s 25 districts between 2013 and 2022. We demonstrate empirically that Graph Neural Networks which incorporate spatiotemporal relations significantly outperform traditional EWS such as Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Random Forest, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Our source code is available on GitHub and will be provided in the final submission.

Graph Neural Networks↗
DOE OSTI2024

A Machine Learning Approach to Quantitative Analysis of Enamel Microstructure from Scanning Electron Microscopy Images

Dental enamel, the outermost tissue of mammalian teeth, must withstand a lifetime of wear and cyclic contact. To meet this demand, enamel possesses a combination of high hardness and resistance to fracture, properties that are typically mutually exclusive. The impressive damage tolerance has been attributed largely to decussation of the enamel rods, the principal unit of its microstructure. As such, enamel is inspiring the design of next‐generation structural materials. However, quantitative descriptions of the decussated enamel rod microstructure remain limited due to challenges encountered in applying computed tomography and in acquiring quality images appropriate for traditional digital processing methods. Here, a machine learning segmentation method is applied to images of the enamel obtained using scanning electron microscopy to support quantitative analysis of the microstructure. A pretrained convolutional neural network is used to expand the input training image dataset to allow the training of a random forest classifier, which ultimately segments the image with a very small training set ( n = 3 images). A validation of this segmentation method is presented, in addition to its application to calculate relevant microstructural parameters for images of tooth enamel from selected mammalian species. The methodology applied here is equally applicable to other hard tissues.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2025

Classifying thermodynamic cloud phase using machine learning models

Vertically resolved thermodynamic cloud-phase classifications are essential for studies of atmospheric cloud and precipitation processes. The Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Thermodynamic Cloud Phase (THERMOCLDPHASE) value-added product (VAP) uses a multi-sensor approach to classify the thermodynamic cloud phase by combining lidar backscatter and depolarization, radar reflectivity, Doppler velocity, spectral width, microwave-radiometer-derived liquid water path, and radiosonde temperature measurements. The measured pixels are classified as ice, snow, mixed phase, liquid (cloud water), drizzle, rain, and liq_driz (liquid+drizzle). We use this product as the ground truth to train three machine learning (ML) models to predict the thermodynamic cloud phase from multi-sensor remote sensing measurements taken at the ARM North Slope of Alaska (NSA) observatory: a random forest (RF), a multi-layer perceptron (MLP), and a convolutional neural network (CNN) with a U-Net architecture. Evaluations against the outputs of the THERMOCLDPHASE VAP with 1 year of data show that the CNN outperforms the other two models, achieving the highest test accuracy, F1 score, and mean intersection over union (IOU). Analysis of ML confidence scores shows that ice, rain, and snow have higher confidence scores, followed by liquid, while mixed, drizzle, and liq_driz have lower scores. Feature importance analysis reveals that the mean Doppler velocity and vertically resolved temperature are the most influential data streams for ML thermodynamic cloud-phase predictions. Lidar measurements exhibit lower feature importance due to rapid signal attenuation caused by the frequent presence of persistent low-level clouds at the NSA site. The ML models' generalization capacity is further evaluated by applying them at another Arctic ARM site in Norway using data taken during the ARM Cold-Air Outbreaks in the Marine Boundary Layer Experiment (COMBLE) field campaign. The models demonstrated similar performance to that observed at the NSA site. Finally, we evaluate the ML models' response to simulated instrument outages and signal degradation and show that a CNN U-Net model trained with input channel dropouts performs better when input fields are missing.

ARM Aerial Facility↗
NASA NTRS1987

A neurocomputer based on an analog-digital hybrid architecture

A novel analog-digital hybrid architecture based on the utilization of high density digital random access memories for the storage of the synaptic weights of a neural network, and high speed analog hardware to perform neural computation is described. An electronic neurocomputer based on such an architecture is ideally suited for investigating the dynamics, associative recall properties, and computational capabilities of neural networks and provides significant speed improvement in comparison to conventional software based neural network simulations. As a demonstration of the feasibility of the hybrid architectural concept, a prototype breadboard hybrid neurocomputer system with 32 neurons has been designed and fabricated with off-the-shelf hardware components. The performance of the breadboard system has been tested for variety of applications including associative memory and combinatorial problem solving such as Graph Coloring, and is discussed in this paper.

Moopenn, A.↗
NASA NTRS2011

The Relative Importance of Random Error and Observation Frequency in Detecting Trends in Upper Tropospheric Water Vapor

Recent published work assessed the amount of time to detect trends in atmospheric water vapor over the coming century. We address the same question and conclude that under the most optimistic scenarios and assuming perfect data (i.e., observations with no measurement uncertainty) the time to detect trends will be at least 12 years at approximately 200 hPa in the upper troposphere. Our times to detect trends are therefore shorter than those recently reported and this difference is affected by data sources used, method of processing the data, geographic location and pressure level in the atmosphere where the analyses were performed. We then consider the question of how instrumental uncertainty plays into the assessment of time to detect trends. We conclude that due to the high natural variability in atmospheric water vapor, the amount of time to detect trends in the upper troposphere is relatively insensitive to instrumental random uncertainty and that it is much more important to increase the frequency of measurement than to decrease the random error in the measurement. This is put in the context of international networks such as the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) Reference Upper-Air Network (GRUAN) and the Network for the Detection of Atmospheric Composition Change (NDACC) that are tasked with developing time series of climate quality water vapor data.

Whiteman, David N.↗
NASA NTRS2015

Modeling the Swift BAT Trigger Algorithm with Machine Learning

To draw inferences about gamma-ray burst (GRB) source populations based on Swift observations, it is essential to understand the detection efficiency of the Swift burst alert telescope (BAT). This study considers the problem of modeling the Swift BAT triggering algorithm for long GRBs, a computationally expensive procedure, and models it using machine learning algorithms. A large sample of simulated GRBs from Lien et al. (2014) is used to train various models: random forests, boosted decision trees (with AdaBoost), support vector machines, and artificial neural networks. The best models have accuracies of approximately greater than 97% (approximately less than 3% error), which is a significant improvement on a cut in GRB flux which has an accuracy of 89:6% (10:4% error). These models are then used to measure the detection efficiency of Swift as a function of redshift z, which is used to perform Bayesian parameter estimation on the GRB rate distribution. We find a local GRB rate density of eta(sub 0) approximately 0.48(+0.41/-0.23) Gpc(exp -3) yr(exp -1) with power-law indices of eta(sub 1) approximately 1.7(+0.6/-0.5) and eta(sub 2) approximately -5.9(+5.7/-0.1) for GRBs above and below a break point of z(sub 1) approximately 6.8(+2.8/-3.2). This methodology is able to improve upon earlier studies by more accurately modeling Swift detection and using this for fully Bayesian model fitting. The code used in this is analysis is publicly available online.

gamma rays: general↗
NASA NTRS2016

Modeling the Swift Bat Trigger Algorithm with Machine Learning

To draw inferences about gamma-ray burst (GRB) source populations based on Swift observations, it is essential to understand the detection efficiency of the Swift burst alert telescope (BAT). This study considers the problem of modeling the Swift / BAT triggering algorithm for long GRBs, a computationally expensive procedure, and models it using machine learning algorithms. A large sample of simulated GRBs from Lien et al. is used to train various models: random forests, boosted decision trees (with AdaBoost), support vector machines, and artificial neural networks. The best models have accuracies of greater than or equal to 97 percent (less than or equal to 3 percent error), which is a significant improvement on a cut in GRB flux, which has an accuracy of 89.6 percent (10.4 percent error). These models are then used to measure the detection efficiency of Swift as a function of redshift z, which is used to perform Bayesian parameter estimation on the GRB rate distribution. We find a local GRB rate density of n (sub 0) approaching 0.48 (sup plus 0.41) (sub minus 0.23) per cubic gigaparsecs per year with power-law indices of n (sub 1) approaching 1.7 (sup plus 0.6) (sub minus 0.5) and n (sub 2) approaching minus 5.9 (sup plus 5.7) (sub minus 0.1) for GRBs above and below a break point of z (redshift) (sub 1) approaching 6.8 (sup plus 2.8) (sub minus 3.2). This methodology is able to improve upon earlier studies by more accurately modeling Swift detection and using this for fully Bayesian model fitting.

gamma-ray burst: general – gamma-rays: general â↗
DOE OSTI2025

Secure Route: Roadway Risk Mapping for Transportation Planners

The secure transport of sensitive materials across U.S. road networks pose unique challenges for local, state, and federal agencies. Threats range from random events (e.g., accidents, medical emergencies, mechanical failures) to opportunistic or organized tactical assaults. Although the probability of such attacks is very low, the consequences of material loss to foreign states or terrorists can be catastrophic, qualifying these scenarios as “grey swan” events—low-probability, high-impact occurrences that are predictable but difficult to quantify. Traditional risk assessments struggle in these contexts, necessitating a shift toward subjective risk perception to inform planning. Risk perception in transport planning is shaped by various factors, including knowledge of adversarial capabilities, vehicle defenses, manifest details, and geographic features along the route. Geographic features such as bridges, tunnels, roadside elevation, and gaps in cellular coverage introduce vulnerabilities, while mitigative features include safe havens, police stations, and medical services. Temporal variables such as congestion, accidents, and weather further complicate route planning. Despite their importance, existing routing tools like Google Maps and commercial software do not explicitly account for geographic risk features, requiring planners to rely on personal familiarity with routes—a time-intensive, non-scalable approach. This work addresses these gaps by: (1) developing datasets that catalog geographic risk features along U.S. roadways, (2) eliciting risk perceptions from experienced transportation security experts, and (3) linking these perceptions to roadway conditions and geographic data. We implement these capabilities within Secure Route a novel mapping tool for classifying route segment risks associated with roadway conditions. This system provides transportation planners with an intuitive interface to assess and contextualize risk along potential routes, improving decision-making for secure transport. We present current progress in this effort and identify next steps.

Stewart, Robert [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000281867559)↗
DOE OSTI2025

Contributions of vegetation heterogeneity within tower footprint to CO 2 flux estimations through graph neural network modeling

Net ecosystem exchange of CO 2 (Fc) measured directly by eddy covariance towers is based on various assumptions, including large, flat and homogenous land cover type. In reality, often a tower site is not large enough for flux measurements, and landscapes consist of patches of different land cover types within the flux footprint. In addition, some portions of fluxes are contributed by different cover types when a footprint exceeds the size of the target ecosystem. The contributions of non-dominant patches to Fc are often ignored. Here, in this study, we propose a novel integrated modeling framework that combines random forest (RF) and XGBoost with a residual correction module based on a deep graph convolutional network (DeeperGCN) to simulate Fc for seven flux measurement sites in southwest Michigan. High-resolution remote sensing vegetation indices, soil properties, meteorological variables, and footprint-weighted spatial features were used as model inputs at three spatial resolutions (10 m, 20 m, 30 m), and their importance in predicting Fc with DeeperGCN was assessed. We found that residual correction using DeeperGCN significantly improved prediction accuracy, with the R 2 increasing from 0.9098 to 0.9479 for RF and from 0.9235 to 0.9433 for XGBoost. At site level, the maximum improvement in R 2 reached 0.1617. Paired t-tests confirmed that these improvements were statistically significant (p < 0.05). Among all predictors, leaf area index and incoming shortwave radiation emerged as the dominant drivers of spatial residual variation, followed by precipitation, relative humidity, and selected vegetation indices. The 20 m resolution yielded the best balance between model performance and computational efficiency. In conclusion, our modeling framework effectively captures both spatial heterogeneity and nonlinear interactions, offering a robust solution for spatially explicit flux modeling in structurally diverse ecosystems beyond the study sites.

footprint model↗
DOE OSTI2022

Analysis of Defects in Metal Additive Manufacturing with Augmented Data Generation

Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a method of additive manufacturing (AM) that selectively melts and fuses together microscopic metallic powder. LPBF offers the benefit of producing custom structures out of high strength metals that can be difficult to fabricate with conventional methods. The challenge of LPBF is that 3D printed structures often have internal pores due to process flaws. Pulsed thermal tomography (PTT) is a method for reconstructing the depth profile of materials, allowing the visualization internal voids in solids. In prior work, we developed a convolutional neural network (CNN) which, having been trained on simulated 2D PTT images of subsurface elliptical defects, was able to classify the semi-major radii, semi-minor radii, and angular orientation of the best-fit ellipses in previously unseen PTT images. The unseen PTT images contained subsurface irregular defect shapes imported from scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of metallic LPBF-printed specimens. Training the CNN on irregular defect shapes instead of on elliptical shapes would make the resulting classifications more descriptive of actual defect shapes. However, this requires a much higher volume of SEM images of material defects, which are difficult to obtain because of random occurrence of defects in LPBF. To address this challenge, we developed a generative adversarial network (GAN) to augment the existing dataset of SEM defect images. The GAN model is demonstrated to create novel yet realistic defect shapes that can be used as input for simulated PTT images to train CNN.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
NASA NTRS1994

Estimation and classification by sigmoids based on mutual information

An estimate of the probability density function of a random vector is obtained by maximizing the mutual information between the input and the output of a feedforward network of sigmoidal units with respect to the input weights. Classification problems can be solved by selecting the class associated with the maximal estimated density. Newton's s method, applied to an estimated density, yields a recursive maximum likelihood estimator, consisting of a single internal layer of sigmoids, for a random variable or a random sequence. Applications to the diamond classification and to the prediction of a sun-spot process are demonstrated.

Baram, Yoram↗
NASA NTRS1985

Limits to the burster repetition rate as deduced from the 2nd catalog of the interplanetary network

The burster repetition rate is an important parameter in many gamma ray burst models. The localizations of the interplanetary network, which have a relatively small combined surface area, may be used to estimate the average repetition rate. The method consists of (1) estimating the number of random overlaps between error boxes expected in the catalog and comparing this number to that actually observed; (2) modeling the response of the detectors in the network, so that the probability of detecting a burst can be estimated; and (3) simulating the arrival of bursts at the network assuming that burster repetition is governed by a Poisson process. The application of this method for many different burster luminosity functions shows that (1) the lower limit to the burster repetition rate depends strongly upon the assumed luminosity function; (2) the best lower limit to the repetition period obtainable from the data of the network is about 100 months; and (3) that a luminosity function for all bursters similar to that of the 1979 Mar 5 burster is inconsistent with the data.

Atteia, J. L.↗
DOE OSTI2024

MDLoader: A Hybrid Model-Driven Data Loader for Distributed Graph Neural Network Training

Scalable data management is essential for processing large scientific dataset on HPC platforms for distributed deep learning. In-memory distributed storage is preferred for its speed, enabling rapid, random, and frequent data access required by stochastic optimizers. Processes use one-sided or collective communication to fetch remote data, with optimal performance depending on (i) dataset characteristics, (ii) training scale, and (iii) interconnection network. Empirical analysis shows collective communication excels with larger mini-batch sizes and/or fewer processes, whereas one-sided communication outperforms at larger scales. We propose MDLoader, a hybrid in-memory data loader for distributed graph neural network training. MDLoader features a model-driven performance estimator that dynamically selects between one-sided and collective communication at the beginning of training using Tree of Parzen Estimators (TPE). Evaluations on NERSC Perlmutter and OLCF Summit show MDLoader outperforms single-backend loaders by up to 2.83 × and predicts the suitable communication method with 96.3% (Perlmutter) and 94.3% (Summit) success rate.

Bae, Jonghyun↗
DOE OSTI2020

Deep learning model to detect various synchrophasor data anomalies

High-density synchrophasors provide valuable information for power grid situational awareness, operation and control. Unfortunately, due to factors including communication instability and hardware failure, their data quality can be greatly deteriorated by anomalies. Since the anomalies can impact the performance of the synchrophasor applications, it is of paramount significance to propose a model to detect anomalies in synchrophasor. In this study, a convolutional neural network model is established to detect and classify the anomalies in the synchrophasor measurements. Additionally, four types of anomalies observed in actual synchrophasors including erroneous patterns, random spikes, missing points and high-frequency interferences are considered in this study. The proposed model is extensively evaluated via field-collected measurements from the synchrophasor network in Jiangsu grid, China. The superior performance of the proposed model indicates the great potential of using deep learning for the detection of abnormal synchrophasor measurements.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2020

The PAU Survey: Photometric redshifts using transfer learning from simulations

In this paper, we introduce the DEEPZ deep learning photometric redshift (photo-z) code. As a test case, we apply the code to the PAU survey (PAUS) data in the COSMOS field. DEEPZ reduces the σ68 scatter statistic by 50 percent at iAB = 22.5 compared to existing algorithms. This improvement is achieved through various methods, including transfer learning from simulations where the training set consists of simulations as well as observations, which reduces the need for training data. The redshift probability distribution is estimated with a mixture density network (MDN), which produces accurate redshift distributions. Our code includes an autoencoder to reduce noise and extract features from the galaxy SEDs. It also benefits from combining multiple networks, which lowers the photo-z scatter by 10 percent. Furthermore, training with randomly constructed coadded fluxes adds information about individual exposures, reducing the impact of photometric outliers. In addition to opening up the route for higher redshift precision with narrow bands, these machine learning techniques can also be valuable for broad-band surveys.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Efficient Interdependent Systems Recovery Modeling with DeepONets

Modeling the recovery of interdependent critical infrastructure is a key component of quantifying and optimizing societal resilience to disruptive events. However, simulating the recovery of large-scale interdependent systems under random disruptive events is computationally expensive. Therefore, we propose the application of Deep Operator Networks (DeepONets) in this paper to accelerate the recovery modeling of interdependent systems. DeepONets are ML architectures which identify mathematical operators from data. The form of governing equations DeepONets identify and the governing equation of interdependent systems recovery model are similar. Therefore, we hypothesize that DeepONets can efficiently model the interdependent systems recovery with little training data. We applied DeepONets to a simple case of four interdependent systems with sixteen states. DeepONets, overall, performed satisfactorily in predicting the recovery of these interdependent systems for out of training sample data when compared to reference results.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Document Classification Techniques for Aviation Letters of Agreement

Often when working with technical documents, it is helpful to classify them into specific categories. In this paper, we conduct a thorough review of natural language processing techniques to perform this classification task on Letters of Agreement (LOAs), technical aviation documents outlining rules for utilizing US airspace. We evaluate multiple techniques, including Transfer Learning, for representing the text in the documents as embeddings: unigram and bigram Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF), Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, GloVe and RoBERTa. We investigate a wide range of classification models: K-Nearest Neighbors, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Feed-Forward Neural Network, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM). By comparing the different methods, we found the best overall approach for our task was to use unigram TFIDF representations with SVM while also gaining insight into how the other methodologies performed on a small technical datasets.

Aayushi Batra↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Document Classification Techniques for Aviation Letters of Agreement

Often when working with historic air traffic management (ATM) documents, it is helpful to classify them into specific categories. In this paper, we conduct a thorough review of natural language processing techniques to perform this classification task on Letters of Agreement (LOAs), technical aviation documents outlining rules for utilizing US airspace. We evaluate multiple techniques for representing the text in the documents as embeddings: unigram and bigram Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF), Word2Vec, Doc2Vec, GloVe and RoBERTa. We investigate a wide range of classification models: K-Nearest Neighbors, Random Forest, Support Vector Machines (SVM), Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Feed-Forward Neural Network, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM). By comparing the different methods, we found the best overall approach for our task was to use unigram TFIDF representations with SVM while also gaining insight into how the other methodologies performed on a small technical datasets.

ATM↗