MolSieve: A Progressive Visual Analytics System for Molecular Dynamics Simulations
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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.
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Evaluating the electrification potential of buildings through retrofitting is crucial for reducing carbon emissions and the carbon footprint of built environments. This study leverages the Automatic Building Energy Modeling (AutoBEM) software, integrating the Model America database to create an urban context-based spatial analysis platform for community engagement and development. We selected Camp Hill Borough, PA, as a case study to analyze building-specific energy performance and evaluate the electrification potential of each building by switching to different Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems and measurement components. The simulation results generated by the workflow provide retrofitting suggestions to help mitigate the carbon footprint as well as energy saving statistics of buildings. Additionally, the developed web-based interface serves as a community engagement platform, allowing residents to provide feedback and further develop interactive communication protocols. The outcomes of this project offer a baseline for community electrification planning and contribute to the design of low-carbon communities.
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The overall aim of the CyclusJS project has been to design novel approaches that support fuel cycle simulations and empower decision-makers and researchers with better tools to compare and contrast results from multiple simulations to understand the landscape of potential outcomes better. In particular, nuclear fuel cycle simulations focus on modeling the nuclear industry and ecosystem at a macroscopic level, and the analysis tools connect such simulations with decision support systems. As a demonstration of the novelty and effectiveness of the proposed approach, we study scenarios for transitioning from one technology, Light Water Reactors (LWR), to a newer Sodium-cooled Fast breeder Reactor (SFR) technology.
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Ground Truth program was designed to evaluate social science modeling approaches using simulation test beds with ground truth intentionally and systematically embedded to understand and model complex Human Domain systems and their dynamics Lazer et al. (Science 369:1060–1062, 2020). Our multidisciplinary team of data scientists, statisticians, experts in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and visual analytics had a unique role on the program to investigate accuracy, reproducibility, generalizability, and robustness of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) causal structure learning approaches applied to fully observed and sampled simulated data across virtual worlds. In addition, we analyzed the feasibility of using machine learning models to predict future social behavior with and without causal knowledge explicitly embedded. In this paper, we first present our causal modeling approach to discover the causal structure of four virtual worlds produced by the simulation teams—Urban Life, Financial Governance, Disaster and Geopolitical Conflict. Our approach adapts the state-of-the-art causal discovery (including ensemble models), machine learning, data analytics, and visualization techniques to allow a human-machine team to reverse-engineer the true causal relations from sampled and fully observed data. We next present our reproducibility analysis of two research methods team’s performance using a range of causal discovery models applied to both sampled and fully observed data, and analyze their effectiveness and limitations. We further investigate the generalizability and robustness to sampling of the SOTA causal discovery approaches on additional simulated datasets with known ground truth. Our results reveal the limitations of existing causal modeling approaches when applied to large-scale, noisy, high-dimensional data with unobserved variables and unknown relationships between them. We show that the SOTA causal models explored in our experiments are not designed to take advantage from vasts amounts of data and have difficulty recovering ground truth when latent confounders are present; they do not generalize well across simulation scenarios and are not robust to sampling; they are vulnerable to data and modeling assumptions, and therefore, the results are hard to reproduce. Finally, when we outline lessons learned and provide recommendations to improve models for causal discovery and prediction of human social behavior from observational data, we highlight the importance of learning data to knowledge representations or transformations to improve causal discovery and describe the benefit of causal feature selection for predictive and prescriptive modeling.
The presence of methylmercury in aquatic environments and marine food sources is of global concern. The chemical reaction for the addition of a methyl group to inorganic mercury occurs in diverse bacterial taxonomic groups including the Gram-negative, sulfate-reducing Desulfovibrionaceae family that inhabit extreme aquatic environments. The availability of whole-genome sequence datasets for members of the Desulfovibrionaceae presents opportunities to understand the microbial mechanisms that contribute to methylmercury production in extreme aquatic environments. We have applied bioinformatics resources and developed visual analytics resources to categorize a collection of 719 putative universal stress protein (USP) sequences predicted from 93 genomes of Desulfovibrionaceae. We have focused our bioinformatics investigations on protein sequence analytics by developing interactive visualizations to categorize Desulfovibrionaceae universal stress proteins by protein domain composition and functionally important amino acids. We identified 651 Desulfovibrionaceae universal stress protein sequences, of which 488 sequences had only one USP domain and 163 had two USP domains. The 488 single USP domain sequences were further categorized into 340 sequences with ATP-binding motif and 148 sequences without ATP-binding motif. The 163 double USP domain sequences were categorized into (1) both USP domains with ATP-binding motif (3 sequences); (2) both USP domains without ATP-binding motif (138 sequences); and (3) one USP domain with ATP-binding motif (21 sequences). We developed visual analytics resources to facilitate the investigation of these categories of datasets in the presence or absence of the mercury-methylating gene pair (hgcAB). Future research could utilize these functional categories to investigate the participation of universal stress proteins in the bacterial cellular uptake of inorganic mercury and methylmercury production, especially in anaerobic aquatic environments.
State-of-the-art visual analytics models and frameworks mostly assume a static snapshot of the data, while in many cases it is a stream with constant updates and changes. Exploration of streaming data poses unique challenges as machine-level computations and abstractions need to be synchronized with the visual representation of the data and the temporally evolving human insights. In the visual analytics literature, we lack a thorough characterization of streaming data and analysis of the challenges associated with task abstraction, visualization design, and adaptation of the role of human-in-the-loop for exploration of data streams. We aim to fill this gap by conducting a survey of the state-of-the-art in visual analytics of streaming data for systematically describing the contributions and shortcomings of current techniques and analyzing the research gaps that need to be addressed in the future. Our contributions are: i) problem characterization for identifying challenges that are unique to streaming data analysis tasks, ii) a survey and analysis of the state-of-the-art in streaming data visualization research with a focus on the visualization design space for dynamic data and the role of the human-in-the-loop, and iii) reflections on the design-trade-offs for streaming visual analytics techniques and their practical applicability in real-world application scenarios.
In its current state, the distribution system is incapable of handling small to moderate amounts of photovoltaic (PV) penetration. This is because it was initially designed for handling passive loads which, at the level of a substation, have low variability and are forecastable with high accuracy. It has been an open loop system with little monitoring and control. With the addition of PV energy sources, the overall scenario will change dramatically due to (1) two way power flow on network; and (2) high aggregate variability. Additionally, changes on the consumption side lead to a number of smart loads, Electric Vehicles (EVs), and Demand Response. These fundamental changes in the characteristics of the generation and consumption of power will lead to a number of practical engineering problems which must be overcome to allow increased penetration of Distributed PV. Solving the unique engineering challenges which arise at moderate levels of PV penetration requires closed loop integration of data from (1) PV sources; (2) customer load data from smart meters; (3) EV charging data; and (4) local and line mounted precision instruments. These data are not traditionally used by utilities in operations since they are ”non-SCADA” and the current grid does not require such levels of control. To integrate this data and provide real time intelligence from these non-SCADA data, we created the Visualization and Analytics of Distribution Systems with Deep Penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (VADER) platform. VADER is a collection of analytics enabled by integration of massive and heterogeneous data streams for granular real-time monitoring, visualization and control of Distributed Energy Resources (DER) in distribution networks. VADER analytics enable utilities to have greater visibility into distributed energy resources. We built several batch- and stream-analytics in VADER which help operators better understand the impact of distributed energy resources on the grid.
This study aims to effectively analyze and visualize the concept to concept network derived from the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) dataset, where we have more than 48,000 concepts with more than 300,000 relationships between concepts. In analyzing networks, we focus on finding relationship patterns between the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) concepts and other concepts. Given the node and edge datasets, we construct directional graphs and calculate all pair shortest paths based on multiple edge weight schemes. However, statistical metrics are not sufficient to identify specific relationships represented in the network. Therefore, we also propose a visual analytics approach to effectively understand the knowledge graph. Our highly interactive visual analytics allows users to effectively analyze the evolving graphs and (COVID-19) concept nodes and other nodes related to the COVID-19 nodes. We envision that this study will pave the path to develop strategies to provide more accurate and scalable predictive analysis on knowledge graphs related to CORD19 and other biomedical knowledge graphs.
This archive contains raw data of visual and acoustic mapping of perforations in Utah FORGE well 16A(78)-32 acquired during the August 2024 circulation program. The dataset includes downhole images captured by EV, a downhole visual analytics company, providing visual records of each perforation. Images are organized in two folders: one set with perforation visualization overlays and one without. An included Excel spreadsheet provides the organized raw data.
This project was inspired by two needs. The first is a need for tools to help scientists and engineers to design effective data visualizations for communicating information, whether to the user of a system, an analyst who must make decisions based on complex data, or in the context of a technical report or publication. Most scientists and engineers are not trained in visualization design, and they could benefit from simple metrics to assess how well their visualization's design conveys the intended message. In other words, will the most important information draw the viewer's attention? The second is the need for cognition-based metrics for evaluating new types of visualizations created by researchers in the information visualization and visual analytics communities. Evaluating visualizations is difficult even for experts. However, all visualization methods and techniques are intended to exploit the properties of the human visual system to convey information efficiently to a viewer. Thus, developing evaluation methods that are rooted in the scientific knowledge of the human visual system could be a useful approach. In this project, we conducted fundamental research on how humans make sense of abstract data visualizations, and how this process is influenced by their goals and prior experience. We then used that research to develop a new model, the Data Visualization Saliency Model, that can make accurate predictions about which features in an abstract visualization will draw a viewer's attention. The model is an evaluation tool that can address both of the needs described above, supporting both visualization research and Sandia mission needs.
Recently, the techniques based on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved a great performance in classification tasks in a wide range of applications, such as image recognition and natural language processing. However, DNN developers face a lot of trial and error during the development process and spend their efforts in debugging their network model through analyzing and understanding the classification results. As such, tools are needed that help the developers not only understand the results, but also suggest the ways to improve their model. In this paper, we propose a visual analytics tool for visualizing the classification results during the iterative development pipeline of a DNN model. Our tool enables exploring the classification results from any type of neural network models, identifying misclassified samples, examining the predicted score distributions of samples, and showing how the outcomes progressively change during the training process.
The visual analytic system enables information retrieval within large text collections. Typically, users have to directly and explicitly query information to retrieve it. With this system and process, the reasoning of the user is inferred from the user interaction they perform in a visual analytic tool, and the appropriate information to query, process, and visualize is systematically determined.
In exascale scientific computing, it is essential to efficiently monitor, evaluate and improve performance. Visualization and especially visual analytics are useful and inevitable techniques in the exascale computing era to enable such a human-centered experience. In this ongoing work, we present a visual analytics framework for performance evaluation of scientific workflows. Ultimately, we aim to solve two current challenges: the capability to deal with workflows, and the scalability toward exascale scenario. On the way to achieve these goals, in this work, we first incorporate TAU (Tuning and Analysis Utilities) instrumentation tool and improve it to accommodate workflow measurements. Then we establish a web-based visualization framework, whose back end handles data storage, query and aggregation, while front end presents the visualization and takes user interaction. In order to support the scalability, a few level-of-detail mechanisms are developed. Finally, a chemistry workflow use case is adopted to verify our methods
Visual analytics supported by high performance computing (HPC) accelerates and enhances the discovery, exploration, and analysis of causal patterns in complex system dynamics (SD) models. We present a suite of visualization-assisted ensemble-based techniques for hypothesis generation and testing, and for sensitivity analysis. By employing HPC to provide parallel, on-demand simulation of SD models, one can “steer” an ensemble of simulated scenarios in real time as one first formulates and then informally tests those hypotheses: this provides rapid feedback for analysts to refine their understanding of the causal relationships emergent from a model. Such understandings can be followed and augmented by rigorous application of statistical methods, namely global variance-based sensitivity analysis, Monte-Carlo filtering, adaptive regional sensitivity analysis, and self-organized maps: here timely computation relies on HPC, while effective presentation emphasizes high-dimensional multivariate data visualization. Immersive visualization in virtual 3D environments provides an excellent adjunct to the traditional 2D graphics typically used for SD models, as it generates an embodied understanding of model behavior and facilitates an active, collaborative critique of model structure and output. Finally, we summarize prospects for HPC-enabled visual analytics applied to SD modeling.