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At least 523 records · Page 29

Assessing the evolution of research topics in a biological field using plant science as an example

Scientific advances due to conceptual or technological innovations can be revealed by examining how research topics have evolved. But such topical evolution is difficult to uncover and quantify because of the large body of literature and the need for expert knowledge in a wide range of areas in a field. Using plant biology as an example, we used machine learning and language models to classify plant science citations into topics representing interconnected, evolving subfields. The changes in prevalence of topical records over the last 50 years reflect shifts in major research trends and recent radiation of new topics, as well as turnover of model species and vastly different plant science research trajectories among countries. Our approaches readily summarize the topical diversity and evolution of a scientific field with hundreds of thousands of relevant papers, and they can be applied broadly to other fields.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Performance Analysis of Deep Learning Workloads on Leading-edge Systems

This work examines the performance of leading-edge systems designed for machine learning computing, including the NVIDIA DGX-2, Amazon Web Services (AWS) P3, IBM Power System Accelerated Compute Server AC922, and a consumer-grade Exxact TensorEX TS4 GPU server. Representative deep learning workloads from the fields of computer vision and natural language processing are the focus of the analysis. Performance analysis is performed along with a number of important dimensions. Performance of the communication interconnects and large and high-throughput deep learning models are considered. Different potential use models for the systems as standalone and in the cloud also are examined. The effect of various optimization of the deep learning models and system configurations is included in the analysis.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Online Tools for Astronomy and Cosmochemistry

Over the past year, the Webnucleo Group at Clemson University has been developing a web site with a number of interactive online tools for astronomy and cosmochemistry applications. The site uses SHP (Simplified Hypertext Preprocessor), which, because of its flexibility, allows us to embed almost any computer language into our web pages. For a description of SHP, please see http://www.joeldenny.com/ At our web site, an internet user may mine large and complex data sets, such as our stellar evolution models, and make graphs or tables of the results. The user may also run some of our detailed nuclear physics and astrophysics codes, such as our nuclear statistical equilibrium code, which is written in fortran and C. Again, the user may make graphs and tables and download the results.

Meyer, B. S.↗

Implementing Access to Data Distributed on Many Processors

A reference architecture is defined for an object-oriented implementation of domains, arrays, and distributions written in the programming language Chapel. This technology primarily addresses domains that contain arrays that have regular index sets with the low-level implementation details being beyond the scope of this discussion. What is defined is a complete set of object-oriented operators that allows one to perform data distributions for domain arrays involving regular arithmetic index sets. What is unique is that these operators allow for the arbitrary regions of the arrays to be fragmented and distributed across multiple processors with a single point of access giving the programmer the illusion that all the elements are collocated on a single processor. Today's massively parallel High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) are characterized by a modular structure, with a large number of processing and memory units connected by a high-speed network. Locality of access as well as load balancing are primary concerns in these systems that are typically used for high-performance scientific computation. Data distributions address these issues by providing a range of methods for spreading large data sets across the components of a system. Over the past two decades, many languages, systems, tools, and libraries have been developed for the support of distributions. Since the performance of data parallel applications is directly influenced by the distribution strategy, users often resort to low-level programming models that allow fine-tuning of the distribution aspects affecting performance, but, at the same time, are tedious and error-prone. This technology presents a reusable design of a data-distribution framework for data parallel high-performance applications. Distributions are a means to express locality in systems composed of large numbers of processor and memory components connected by a network. Since distributions have a great effect on the performance of applications, it is important that the distribution strategy is flexible, so its behavior can change depending on the needs of the application. At the same time, high productivity concerns require that the user be shielded from error-prone, tedious details such as communication and synchronization.

James, Mark↗

Data Centers and Digital Assurance Workshop 3 – Mitigations for Digital Assurance Risks

The third session of the TADA (Technical Assistance for Digital Assurance) Data Centers Cohort, held on November 18, 2025, focused on developing mitigation strategies for digital assurance risks identified in previous workshops. Hosted by Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and ScottMadden, the session emphasized the application of Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) to data center infrastructure, particularly at the utility–data center interface. Participants revisited and ranked key digital assurance risks, including architecture and interface weaknesses, governance gaps, and AI-enabled threats. The workshop introduced the 12 principles of CIE, advocating for consequence-focused design, engineered controls, and secure information architecture to proactively reduce cyber-physical vulnerabilities. These principles were applied to critical data center systems such as power distribution, UPS, cooling, SCADA/BMS, and grid-forming batteries. The session also addressed governance challenges at the interconnection boundary, highlighting the need for clear roles in telemetry sharing, firmware management, and trip settings. Special attention was given to emerging risks from behind-the-meter (BTM) generation, including reverse-power flow and the integration of small modular reactors (SMRs), which shift data centers from large loads to complex generation nodes. Participants explored how interconnection agreements can serve as enforceable instruments for digital assurance, and reviewed gaps in current standards such as NERC CIP, IEC 62443, and IEEE 1547. The workshop concluded with pathways to standardization, including model agreement language, state-level programs, and expanded NERC guidance. INL also presented tools and frameworks for secure procurement and supplier risk management, reinforcing the need for integrated engineering and policy solutions to secure the evolving data center–grid ecosystem. Session 3 of 3.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

EpitopeVec: linear epitope prediction using deep protein sequence embeddings

Motivation: B-cell epitopes (BCEs) play a pivotal role in the development of peptide vaccines, immuno-diagnostic reagents and antibody production, and thus in infectious disease prevention and diagnostics in general. Experimental methods used to determine BCEs are costly and time-consuming. Therefore, it is essential to develop computational methods for the rapid identification of BCEs. Although several computational methods have been developed for this task, generalizability is still a major concern, where cross-testing of the classifiers trained and tested on different datasets has revealed accuracies of 51–53%. Results: We describe a new method called EpitopeVec, which uses a combination of residue properties, modified antigenicity scales, and protein language model-based representations (protein vectors) as features of peptides for linear BCE predictions. Extensive benchmarking of EpitopeVec and other state-of-the-art methods for linear BCE prediction on several large and small datasets, as well as cross-testing, demonstrated an improvement in the performance of EpitopeVec over other methods in terms of accuracy and area under the curve. As the predictive performance depended on the species origin of the respective antigens (viral, bacterial and eukaryotic), we also trained our method on a large viral dataset to create a dedicated linear viral BCE predictor with improved cross-testing performance.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Advanced Computational Framework for Environmental Management ZEM, Version 1.x

Typically environmental management problems require analysis of large and complex data sets originating from concurrent data streams with different data collection frequencies and pedigree. These big data sets require on-the-fly integration into a series of models with different complexity for various types of model analyses where the data are applied as soft and hard model constraints. This is needed to provide fast iterative model analyses based on the latest available data to guide decision-making. Furthermore, the data and model are associated with uncertainties. The uncertainties are probabilistic (e.g. measurement errors) and non-probabilistic (unknowns, e.g. alternative conceptual models characterizing site conditions). To address all of these issues, we have developed an integrated framework for real-time data and model analyses for environmental decision-making called ZEM. The framework allows for seamless and on-the-fly integration of data and modeling results for robust and scientifically-defensible decision-making applying advanced decision analyses tools such as Bayesian- Information-Gap Decision Theory (BIG-DT). The framework also includes advanced methods for optimization that are capable of dealing with a large number of unknown model parameters, and surrogate (reduced order) modeling capabilities based on support vector regression techniques. The framework is coded in Julia, a state-of-the-art high-performance programing language (http://julialang.org). The ZEM framework is open-source and can be applied to any environmental management site. The framework will be open-source and released under GPL V3 license.

Vesselinov, VelimirV.↗

Difference-Equation/Flow-Graph Circuit Analysis

Numerical technique enables rapid, approximate analyses of electronic circuits containing linear and nonlinear elements. Practiced in variety of computer languages on large and small computers; for circuits simple enough, programmable hand calculators used. Although some combinations of circuit elements make numerical solutions diverge, enables quick identification of divergence and correction of circuit models to make solutions converge.

Mcvey, I. M.↗

XScan: An Integrated Tool for Understanding Open Source Community-Based Scientific Code

Many scientific communities have adopted community-based models that integrate multiple components to simulate whole system dynamics. The community software projects’ complexity, stems from the integration of multiple individual software components that were developed under different application requirements and various machine architectures, has become a challenge for effective software system understanding and continuous software development. The paper presents an integrated software toolkit called X-ray Software Scanner (in abbreviation, XScan) for a better understanding of large-scale community-based scientific codes. Our software tool provides support to quickly summarize the overall information of scientific codes, including the number of lines of code, programming languages, external library dependencies, as well as architecture-dependent parallel software features. The XScan toolkit also realizes a static software analysis component to collect detailed structural information and provides an interactive visualization and analysis of the functions. We use a large-scale community-based Earth System Model to demonstrate the workflow, functions and visualization of the toolkit. We also discuss the application of advanced graph analytics techniques to assist software modular design and component refactoring.

Zheng, Weijian↗

BERT-Based Topic Modeling and Information Retrieval to Support Fishbone Diagramming for Safe Integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Wildfire Response

Recent concepts for emerging wildfire response operations have included unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) due to their increasing accessibility and capabilities. To integrate UAS into wildfire response safely, researchers have studied the use of large repositories of historic incident reports to improve the scope of root cause analysis. Recent work has emphasized applying state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to extract useful information from these repositories. However, it has not yet been studied how these results can be interpreted and integrated into the systems engineering process. In this work, we propose a process in which Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based topic modeling and information retrieval are applied to a relevant set of documents in order to support the development of a fishbone diagram in a semiautomated process. High-level themes in the document set are identified using topic modeling, which are then refined and interpreted by a human analyst. Then, the themes are used to guide a finer search using information retrieval, which returns specific incident reports of relevance. This provides traceability to specific incidents as well as broader categorizations that comprise the fishbone branches. We apply the proposed process to relevant documents from NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). The proposed process is widely applicable when relevant documents are available, and the results from this study will be useful to identifying potential causes of wildfire response UAS incidents.

Hazard analysis↗

BERT-based Topic Modeling and Information Retrieval to Support Fishbone Diagramming for Safe Integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Wildfire Response

Recent concepts for emerging wildfire response operations have included unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) due to their increasing accessibility and capabilities. To integrate UAS into wildfire response safely, researchers have studied the use of large repositories of historic incident reports to improve the scope of root cause analysis. Recent work has emphasized applying state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to extract useful information from these repositories. However, it has not yet been studied how these results can be interpreted and integrated into the systems engineering process. In this work, we propose a process in which Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based topic modeling and information retrieval are applied to a relevant set of documents in order to support the development of a fishbone diagram in a semiautomated process. High-level themes in the document set are identified using topic modeling, which are then refined and interpreted by a human analyst. Then, the themes are used to guide a finer search using information retrieval, which returns specific incident reports of relevance. This provides traceability to specific incidents as well as broader categorizations that comprise the fishbone branches. We apply the proposed process to relevant documents from NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). The proposed process is widely applicable when relevant documents are available, and the results from this study will be useful to identifying potential causes of wildfire response UAS incidents.

hazard analysis↗

BERT-based Topic Modeling and Information Retrieval to Support Fishbone Diagramming for Safe Integration of Unmanned Aircraft Systems in Wildfire Response

Recent concepts for emerging wildfire response operations have included unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) due to their increasing accessibility and capabilities. To integrate UAS into wildfire response safely, researchers have studied the use of large repositories of historic incident reports to improve the scope of root cause analysis. Recent work has emphasized applying state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to extract useful information from these repositories. However, it has not yet been studied how these results can be interpreted and integrated into the systems engineering process. In this work, we propose a process in which Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)-based topic modeling and information retrieval are applied to a relevant set of documents in order to support the development of a fishbone diagram in a semiautomated process. High-level themes in the document set are identified using topic modeling, which are then refined and interpreted by a human analyst. Then, the themes are used to guide a finer search using information retrieval, which returns specific incident reports of relevance. This provides traceability to specific incidents as well as broader categorizations that comprise the fishbone branches. We apply the proposed process to relevant documents from NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). The proposed process is widely applicable when relevant documents are available, and the results from this study will be useful to identifying potential causes of wildfire response UAS incidents.

hazard analysis↗

Pile-up mitigation using attention

Abstract Particle production from secondary proton-proton collisions, commonly referred to as pile-up, impair the sensitivity of both new physics searches and precision measurements at large hadron collider (LHC) experiments. We propose a novel algorithm, Puma , for modeling pile-up with the help of deep neural networks based on sparse transformers. These attention mechanisms were developed for natural language processing but have become popular in other applications. In a realistic detector simulation, our method outperforms classical benchmark algorithms for pile-up mitigation in key observables. It provides a perspective for mitigating the effects of pile-up in the high luminosity era of the LHC, where up to 200 proton-proton collisions are expected to occur simultaneously.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

ZEM: Integrated Framework for Real-Time Data and Model Analyses for Robust Environmental Management Decision Making - 16438

Typically environmental management (EM) problems require analysis of large and complex data sets originating from concurrent data streams with different data collection frequencies and pedigree. These big data sets require on-the-fly analysis, assimilation and integration into a series of models with different complexity for various types of model-based analyses. This is needed to provide fast iterative model analyses based on the latest available data to guide decision-making. Furthermore, the data and model are associated with uncertainties. The uncertainties are probabilistic (e.g. measurement errors) and non-probabilistic (unknowns, e.g. alternative conceptual models characterizing site conditions). To address all of these issues, we have developed an integrated framework for real-time data and model analyses for environmental decision-making called ZEM. The framework allows for seamless and on-the-fly integration of data and modeling results for robust and scientifically-defensible decision-making applying advanced decision analyses tools such as Bayesian-Information-Gap Decision Theory (BIG-DT). The framework also includes advanced methods for optimization that are capable of dealing with a large number of unknown model parameters, and surrogate (reduced order) modeling capabilities based on support vector regression techniques. The framework is predominantly coded in Julia, a state-of-the-art high-performance programing language (http://julialang.org) and incorporates the MADS computational tools (Model Analysis and Decision Support; http://mads.lanl.gov). We demonstrate the application of ZEM for data and model analyses at the LANL Chromium site. The ZEM framework will be released as open-source code and can be applied to any environmental management site. (authors)

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

W2VPCA: A Machine Learning Method for Measuring Attitudes With Natural Language

Company strategy influences many decisions in freight transportation. Behavioral models of company decision-making therefore could benefit from including strategy variables. However, strategy is difficult to observe and quantify. Attitudinal surveys of company executives can be used to collect measurements of latent strategy to use in quantitative models. However, surveys are costly and burdensome. Text mining methods to collect measurements overcome these issues somewhat, but typically require manual intervention and ignore the context of words, which can be problematic. This study introduces a new machine learning method to generate strategy measurement data from existing big text data. The new method, called W2VPCA, combines Natural Language Processing and Principal Components Analysis. W2VPCA produces measurement data that serve as quantitative indicators of latent strategy in behavioral models. W2VPCA is unsupervised, data-driven, and uses information on word context. We apply W2VPCA to generate measurements of latent strategies using readily available, large-scale text data: annual company reports. The empirical measurements are used successfully to associate two latent strategies, one focusing on distribution and the other on products, with truck fleet and distribution center outsourcing decisions. The main empirical outcome is that the W2VPCA measurements outperform Bag-of-Words measurements in a psychometric analysis of latent firm strategies. While this study focuses on freight behavioral models, W2VPCA may also have applications in behavioral modeling in other domains.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Fine-grained Asynchronous Bulk Synchronous parallelism model for PGAS applications

The Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model is well suited for executing irregular applications on cluster-based systems, due to its efficient support for short, one-sided messages. Separately, the actor model has been gaining popularity as a productive asynchronous message-passing approach for distributed objects in enterprise and cloud computing platforms, typically implemented in languages such as Erlang, Scala or Rust. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no past work on using the actor model to deliver both productivity and scalability to irregular PGAS applications with large number of small messages. In this paper, we introduce a new programming system for PGAS applications, in which point-to-point remote operations can be expressed as fine-grained asynchronous actor messages. In our approach, the programmer does not need to worry about programming complexities related to message aggregation and termination detection. Our approach can be viewed as extending the classical Bulk Synchronous Parallelism model with fine-grained asynchronous communications within a phase or superstep. Here, we believe that our approach offers a desirable point in the productivity-performance space for PGAS applications, with more scalable performance and higher productivity relative to past approaches. Specifically, for seven irregular mini-applications from the Bale Kernels and three graph kernels executed using 2048 cores in the NERSC Cori system, our approach shows geometric mean performance improvements of ≥ 20X relative to standard PGAS versions (UPC and OpenSHMEM) while maintaining comparable productivity to those versions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A large-scale, agent-based simulation of metropolitan freight movements with passenger and freight market interactions

This study summarizes the first stage in the implementation of an agent-based freight modeling system that has a global representation of agents and detailed modeling of a large-scale transportation network. The model is used to evaluate the transportation and energy impacts of goods movement across urban and national scales. The framework is implemented within POLARIS, a C++-based Planning and Operations Language for Agent-based Regional Integrated Simulation, which consists of an activity-based modeling (ABM) and dynamic traffic assignment (DTA) system that has robust features for passenger travel. This platform provides a tool to model interactions among consumers, producers, and the transportation system. The main objective of this initial implementation is to implement a freight model within POLARIS following an agent-based paradigm with behavioral and simulation methods. This paper presents the initial framework and illustrates the application of the model. Building upon earlier works, a parcel location assignment algorithm for business establishments in the population is documented, along with a method for estimating establishment production and consumption volumes. In addition to population generation, other features of the model include push-pull supply chains, multimodal path choice, choice of transportation logistics node, and dynamic traffic assignment. A module with e-commerce supply and demand was also developed to analyze the effects of e-commerce delivery on last-mile energy use and congestion.

agent-based freight↗

Experimental Applications of Automatic Test Markup Language (ATML)

The authors describe challenging use-cases for Automatic Test Markup Language (ATML), and evaluate solutions. The first case uses ATML Test Results to deliver active features to support test procedure development and test flow, and bridging mixed software development environments. The second case examines adding attributes to Systems Modelling Language (SysML) to create a linkage for deriving information from a model to fill in an ATML document set. Both cases are outside the original concept of operations for ATML but are typical when integrating large heterogeneous systems with modular contributions from multiple disciplines.

Lansdowne, Chatwin A.↗