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At least 559 records · Page 31

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Technologies for Advanced Reactors (Workshop Summary Report)

A workshop on artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) for advanced reactors (AR) was held October 5-6, 2021. The workshop was to be attended in-person at ANL but COVID restrictions forced the workshop to go virtual. The objectives of the workshop were to identify the most promising AI/ML opportunities for improving advanced reactor design, optimizing plant performance, and enhancing economic competitiveness and to develop an understanding of the scientific, engineering and licensing challenges facing their application. The workshop planning committee included GAIN, EPRI and NEI and members of three national laboratories (ANL, INL, and ORNL). The workshop was attended by more than 200 individuals representing academic and scientific institutions and the nuclear power industry. The definition put forth for an AI/ML system was one that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals. In this report AI/ML refers to next generation algorithms that include deep learning, statistical analysis and data analytics and associated scientific computing and their potential application to the design, licensing, operation and maintenance of ARs. These methods typically incorporate models built from process data and may also include data generated by simulations that represent the behavior of a system. The workshop was organized in response to the growing interest in application of AI/ML for improving the economic competitiveness of nuclear energy. Increasingly more resources are being allocated to investigating the benefits of AI/ML methods. The DOE created the Artificial Intelligence & Technology Office to promote their development. And within the Office of Nuclear Energy, resources have been allocated to explore and understand the potential benefits of AI/ML. Additionally, the national laboratories are strategically positioned with DOE computing facilities such as Summit, Perlmutter, Aurora and Frontier that support large-scale simulations, hybrid HPC models with AI surrogates, and the exploration of new types of generative models emerging from multi-model data streams and sources. The workshop was organized with members of the AR community to understand the effort and to identify the level of interest and progress in this emerging technology. The workshop discussions focused on identifying opportunities for AI/ML across diverse areas of the nuclear industry and identifying current scientific and engineering challenges for advanced reactors that might be addressed through transformational uses of AI/ML. Discussion panels focused on four high-interest technical domains for advanced reactors: design, maintenance and operations, energy storage, and materials. The results of those discussions are summarized in this report. This includes opportunities that were identified for exploiting AI techniques and methods to improve the efficacy and efficiency of reactor analysis and to improve the operation and optimization of advanced reactors. Advanced reactor developers expressed an interest in learning more about AI/ML methods and their application. This included understanding whether ML methods can provide an advantage over existing nonlinear data regression methods for collapsing high-fidelity simulation results into faster running models. A consensus emerged that AR advances planned for the next decade will benefit from the use of AI/ML tools. The need exists to understand and model complex systems across length scales and modalities. AI/ML is a tool for discovery that can yield a set of engineering principles for use by nuclear engineers, licensing bodies, and operators to solve problems in plant design, safety analyses, autonomous operation, and predictive maintenance. While AI/ML represents a new set of tools, an awareness by the nuclear community of the full potential is still in the early stages so there is a need to increase awareness. It appears that the wide-spread adoption of AI/ML tools for ARs would be facilitated by future educational workshops that describe foundational methods and capabilities and describe successful applications.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Critical Elements in Produced Fluids from Nevada and Utah

Critical elements and related analytical data for produced fluids from geothermal fields in Nevada and Utah, Sevier thermal belt hot springs, Utah, and Uinta basin oil-gas wells, Utah are reported. Analytical results include pH, major species, trace elements, transition metals, other metals, metalloids and REEs. Gas samples were collected and analyzed from Beowawe, Dixie Valley, Roosevelt Hot Springs, and Thermo. Helium gases and helium isotopes were analyzed on samples collected at Patua, San Emido and two wells in the Uinta basin.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗

Geophysical Retrievals in an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Framework for Illuminating Processes Controlling Water Cycle

Focal Area(s): This white paper responds to Focal Area #3: Insight gleaned from complex data (both observed and simulated) using AI, big data analytics, and other advanced methods, including explainable AI and physics- or knowledge-guided AI. Science Challenge: This white paper addresses the water-cycle and data-model integration grand challenge. It leverages data from the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility, and Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiment (NGEE), and Science Focus Area (SFA). The white paper focuses on controlling cloud, precipitation, and radiative properties as observed and simulated by the Earth System Models (ESM). The described framework can be readily applied to any other ensemble of instruments, including satellites and other ground-based networks.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Natural Language Processing for Text Based Event Extraction: Identifying Events of Interest Related to Worldwide State-Sponsored Civil Nuclear Power

Beginning in FY20, SRNL was funded by the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Defense Nuclear Non-Proliferation Research and Development to develop a prototype natural language processing/natural language understating machine learning-based modeling and analysis pipeline to extract and forecast events of interest from massive open data sources. The working hypothesis within the approach is that contextual shifts in key words and phrases act as indicators of events of interest over time. Therefore, by identifying points in time where contextual shifts occur, events of interest can be extracted along with explicit and implicit connections of entities and activities. The development of the preliminary prototype pipeline proved successful, meriting further testing of the pipeline on more broad topical domains and in a worldwide data environment. Therefore, SRNL, in collaboration with the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics at Virginia Tech, have continued development with a test case of identifying events of interest related to worldwide state-sponsored civil nuclear power in open data sources. In the first year of this follow-on effort, the team has curated domain-specific data corpuses using an automated scheme and applied the modeling and analysis pipeline. This robust, focused, and efficient approach consists of an ensemble of analyses applied to time dependent word embedding models that are trained on the data corpuses. In this report, the team has demonstrated the capability of the existing pipeline (as development has continued in parallel) by exploring several specific case-studies centered around Rosatom’s international activities regarding the planning, construction, operation, and/or shutdown of nuclear reactors. A basic timeline events has been generated by manually cataloging known “milestone” events that have occurred at reactors in Turkey, Finland, Hungary, and Egypt and compared with the output of the modeling pipeline. In this approach, the team has characterized the lead time using the prototype pipeline, as well as the ability to capture relevant information, which proved 100% successful. A deep dive example of the Akkuyu reactor (Turkey) is presented that shows the breadth of information that can be captured using the approach. In this case study, events were extracted pertaining to the planning/construction of Akkuyu including protests from the population, information campaigns in response to the protests, forged regulatory documents and lawsuits, budgetary/shareholder information, geopolitical tensions, and the various construction milestones. This has demonstrated the pipeline’s utility as a research aid or real-time event extraction tool, where summary-level information and detailed text extractions from millions of articles or Tweets across long time periods can be generated with significantly less effort than current techniques.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Asset Monitoring using Smart Sensing and Advanced Analytics for the Distribution Network

As the electric grid transitions into a highly distributed and intelligent grid, electric utilities are becoming increasingly concerned with monitoring the health and performance of their distribution assets. As Internet of Things technologies and data analytics become inexpensive and ubiquitous, low-cost asset monitoring becomes more feasible. Moreover, using edge analytics, computations can be off-loaded to these intelligent sensors to report only actionable information to the cloud. This needs to be done in a highly distributed manner using non-intrusive sensors and device physics that seamlessly integrates with legacy infrastructure. Here, this paper reviews existing sensor based solutions, identifies t heir issues, proposes a novel solution by exploring the required attributes and proposes an approach for low-cost distribution transformer health monitoring.

Asset monitoring↗

Enabling Scalable and Extensible Memory-mapped Datastores in Userspace

Exascale workloads are expected to incorporate data-intensive processing in close coordination with traditional physics simulations. These emerging scientific, data-analytics and machine learning applications need to access a wide variety of datastores in flat files and structured databases. Programmer productivity is greatly enhanced by mapping datastores into the application process's virtual memory space to provide a unified “in-memory” interface. Currently, memory mapping is provided by system software primarily designed for generality and reliability. However, scalability at high concurrency is a formidable challenge on exascale systems. Also, there is a need for extensibility to support new datastores potentially requiring HPC data transfer services. In this article, we present UMap , a scalable and extensible userspace service for memory-mapping datastores. Furthermore, through decoupled queue management, concurrency aware adaptation, and dynamic load balancing, UMap enables application performance to scale even at high concurrency. We evaluate UMap in data-intensive applications, including sorting, graph traversal, database operations, and metagenomic analytics. Our results show that UMap as a userspace service outperforms an optimized kernel-based service across a wide range of intra-node concurrency by 1.22-1.9 × . We performed two case studies to demonstrate UMap 's extensibility. First, a new datastore residing in remote memory is incorporated into UMap as an application-specific plugin. Second, we present a persistent memory allocator Metall built atop UMap for unified storage/memory.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Hyperspectral segmentation of plants in fabricated ecosystems

Hyperspectral imaging provides a powerful tool for analyzing above-ground plant characteristics in fabricated ecosystems, offering rich spectral information across diverse wavelengths. This study presents an efficient workflow for hyperspectral data segmentation and subsequent data analytics, minimizing the need for user annotation through the use of ensembles of sparse mixed scale convolution neural networks. The segmentation process leverages the diversity of ensembles to achieve high accuracy with minimal labeled data, reducing labor-intensive annotation efforts. To further enhance robustness, we incorporate image alignment techniques to address spatial variability in the dataset. Downstream analysis focuses on using the segmented data for processing spectral data, enabling monitoring of plant health. This approach provides a scalable solution for spectral segmentation, and facilitates actionable insights into plant conditions in complex, controlled environments. Our results demonstrate the utility of combining advanced machine learning techniques with hyperspectral analytics for high-throughput plant monitoring.

Zwart, Petrus H.↗

A Performance Model of In-Situ Techniques

The computational capacity of High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems increases continuously with the rapid development of central processing units (CPUs) and graphic processing units (GPUs), while the in-/output (IO) subsystem develops relatively slowly and storage capacity is also limited. Data-intensive applications, which are designed to leverage the high computational capacity of HPC resources, typically generate a considerable amount of data for post-processing visualizations and data analytics. The limited IO speed and storage space could lead to constraints in the actual performance of these applications and, therefore, scientific discovery. In-situ techniques, where data is visualized/analysed while still in memory rather than through disk, can contribute to alleviating these problems as they can reduce or even fully avoid data writing/reading through the IO subsystem to/from storage. However, the overall efficiency of insitu techniques crucially depends on the characteristics of both the in-situ tasks and the applications, and the resource distribution among them. Therefore, choosing the right in-situ approach (synchronous, asynchronous, or hybrid) and resource allocation is essential to minimize overhead and maximize the benefits of concurrent execution. In this paper, we present a performance model of in-situ techniques to find the most beneficial in-situ approach and the preferred resource configuration. We verify the high accuracy of our approach with over 6800 measurements and provide use cases with different applications.

Ju, Yi [Max Planck Computing and Data Facility, Ga↗

Regression for Assessing Contaminant Plume Trends

The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Hanford site has significant dissolved-phase groundwater contaminant plumes, for which remediation activities are ongoing. Assessing concentration trends is critical for making decisions regarding remedy implementation or performance. The SOCRATES single-page web application provides a quality-assured framework for data access and consistent data analytics using standard methods. To provide trend information for remedial decisions, statistical analyses based on ordinary least squares (OLS) are already supported by SOCRATES. The presence of censored data, however, can skew the result of an OLS regression. Other methods, such as the Akritas-Theil-Sen (ATS) or Tobit regressions can be more powerful. These two regression methods are used by Hanford site personnel to analyze groundwater contaminant concentration data, which often include nondetects (censored data). The ATS method uses comparisons of observation-pair ranks and the Tobit method uses a maximum likelihood estimation method. The Tobit method can also accommodate covariates, such as river stage or groundwater level fluctuations. Both ATS and Tobit regressions can be performed with the statistics software R, but to incorporate these methods into SOCRATES, their R code was ported into JavaScript. For quality assurance verification, the new code was tested with hexavalent chromium concentration data from the Hanford 100-K West Area and compared to regression analyses that were previously conducted on this data using R.

100-K Area↗

Database Management Module Framework for Dynamic Contingency Analysis and Visualization

The Dynamic Contingency Analysis Tool (DCAT) is being developed to mimic the response of generation dynamics, protection, and load components to extreme contingencies in power systems. Currently, DCAT generates a huge data set, with the analysis results stored in multiple subfolders using a great many files in different formats (power flow cases, time series, figures, spreadsheets). To help power system engineers thoroughly understand and analyze system behavior under many scenarios and contingencies, we developed a database management module (DBM) that enables future integration of DCAT with industry-grade Big Data analytical and interactive visualization platforms. In this paper, we demonstrate the DBM framework with interactive analytics and visualization for DCAT on the synthetic South Carolina 500-bus power system model using hurricane contingencies that capture possibilities for an extreme contingency. DCAT’s advanced data management and interactive visualization can help planning engineers to visually explore and analyze system behavior, all in one view.

Cascading, dynamic simulations, database managemen↗

Arjun Shankar: Advancing National Missions through Smart Data

Computer scientist Arjun Shankar is director of the Compute and Data Environment for Science (CADES), ORNL’s multidisciplinary big data computing center. CADES offers computing, networking and data analytics to facilitate workflows for both ORNL and external research projects.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Machine Learning of Bacterial Transcriptomes Reveals Responses Underlying Differential Antibiotic Susceptibility

In vitro antibiotic susceptibility testing often fails to accurately predict in vivo drug efficacies, in part due to differences in the molecular composition between standardized bacteriologic media and physiological environments within the body. Here, we investigate the interrelationship between antibiotic susceptibility and medium composition in Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655 as contextualized through machine learning of transcriptomics data. Application of independent component analysis, a signal separation algorithm, shows that complex phenotypic changes induced by environmental conditions or antibiotic treatment are directly traced to the action of a few key transcriptional regulators, including RpoS, Fur, and Fnr. Integrating machine learning results with biochemical knowledge of transcription factor activation reveals medium-dependent shifts in respiration and iron availability that drive differential antibiotic susceptibility. By extension, the data generation and data analytics workflow used here can interrogate the regulatory state of a pathogen under any measured condition and can be applied to any strain or organism for which sufficient transcriptomics data are available.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

SWinzip v. 2.0

SWinzip is a Matlab and C++ library for scientific lossy data compression and reconstruction using compressed sensing and tree-wavelets transforms. These methods are known for their large compression and usefulness in data analytics such as features extraction. Compressed sensing and wavelets methods rely heavily on sparse and dense linear algebra operations implemented through the Boost codes in our library. SWinzip accommodates data represented on both regular grids (e.g. image data) and point-clouds (e.g. unstructured meshes). In SWinzip v2.0, there is more focus on wavelet compression and the following features are added: - The matrix-free (direct) wavelet transform is implemented in both C++ and Matlab. A threshold-based compression can now be used. Examples for distributed compression are also added. - Python implementation of Alpert wavelet transforms - Field data comparison using wavelets in Matlab with global and local metrics

Solloum, Maher↗

SWinzip v. 1.0

SWinzip is a Matlab and C++ library for scientific lossy data compression and reconstruction using compressed sensing and tree-wavelets transforms. These methods are known for their large compression and usefulness in data analytics such as features extraction. Compressed sensing and wavelets methods rely heavily on sparse and dense linear algebra operations implemented through the Boost codes in our library. SWinzip accommodates data represented on both regular grids (e.g. image data) and point-clouds (e.g. unstructured meshes).

Salloum, Maher↗

Machine Learning and Economic Models to Enable Risk-Informed Condition Based Maintenance of a Nuclear Plant Asset

The primary objective of this research is to address challenges in the implementation of risk-informed, condition-based predictive maintenance (PdM), which reduces operating costs while still maintaining the safety and reliability of commercial nuclear power plants (NPPs). To achieve the objective, risk models are being developed by taking advantage of advancements in data analytics, deep learning, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). The notable outcomes presented in the report include ? Development of a ML models using heterogeneous plant process and vibration data collected at different spatial and temporal resolutions from the Salem?s CWS to diagnose a circulating water pump (CWP) failure based on salient fault signatures. The developed diagnostic models are extendable to other faults associated with CWPs and CWP motors given associated fault signatures. ? Development of a natural language processing (NLP) technique to automatically classify the WO data into different categories. The developed NLP technique was validated on independent WO data. This automates the tedious and time-consuming activity of mining and classifying WOs by subject matter experts. ? Estimation of mean time between downtime (i.e., time duration between time instances when 1 or more CWPs are not available) and developed an approach to establish reliability of CWS components using unstructured WO data along with CWS plant process data. ? Formulation of economic model based on Markov chain models. The parameters of associated with the transition rate between different states of Markov chain models were estimated using WO data. The economic model formulation and discussion captures both time-independent and time-dependent parameter variation, leading to risk-informed decision-making.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Fractal Dimension Calculation for Big Data Using Box Locality Index

The box-counting approach for fractal dimension calculation is scaled up for big data using a data structure named box locality index (BLI). The BLI is constructed as key-value pair style with the key (an integer array) indexing the location of a “box” (i.e., a gird cell on the multi-dimensional space embedding a given dataset) and the value counting the number of data points inside the box (called “box occupancy”). Compared with the traditionally used E-dim tree, the BLI avoids complex hierarchical structure and encodes only necessary information required by box-counting approach for fractal dimension calculation. Moreover, the key-value pair nature of BLI, together with the fact that the box occupancy is aggregatable, grants box-counting approach the needed scalability for fractal dimension calculation of big data using distributed computing techniques (e.g., MapReduce and Spark). Taking the advantage of the BLI, MapReduce and Spark methods for fractal dimension calculation of big data are developed, which conduct box-counting for each grid level as a cascade of MapReduce/Spark jobs in a bottom-up fashion. In an empirical validation, the MapReduce and Spark methods demonstrated good effectiveness and efficiency in fractal calculation of a big synthetic dataset. In summary, this work provides an efficient solution for the estimation of intrinsic dimension of big data that is essential for many machine learning methods and data analytics.

Fractal dimension, Intrinsic dimension, Box-counti↗

BOSC 2025, the 26th Bioinformatics Open Source Conference

The 26th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2025, open-bio.org/events/bosc-2025) brought its community-driven focus on open-source bioinformatics and open science to the 2025 conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology and the European Conference on Computational Biology (ISMB/ECCB 2025). Since its launch in 2000, BOSC has been the premier annual meeting covering open-source bioinformatics and open science. Framed by two keynote addresses and a thought-provoking panel discussion, the two-day conference included sessions dedicated to open data, analytic tools and pipelines, workflow platforms, knowledge representation, and the application of AI/ML. The first keynote talk was delivered by Christine Orengo: “Working together to develop, promote and protect our data resources: Lessons learnt developing CATH and TED.” A joint session with the Bio-Ontologies and Knowledge Representation (BOKR) track the second day of BOSC started with a keynote talk by Chris Mungall entitled “Open Knowledge Bases in the Age of Generative AI”. A closing panel on Data Sustainability, moderated by Mónica Muñoz Torres, featured panelists Scott Edmunds, Varsha Khodiyar, Tony Burdett, Nicky Mulder, and Chris Mungall. This year, the CollaborationFest collaborative work event that typically precedes or follows ISMB was incorporated as part of the main conference and organized by BOSC with help from the Function and 3D-SIG tracks.

bioinformatics↗

A Real-Time Magnetoencephalography Brain-Computer Interface Using Interactive 3D Visualization and the Hadoop Ecosystem

Ecumenically, the fastest growing segment of Big Data is human biology-related data and the annual data creation is on the order of zetabytes. The implications are global across industries, of which the treatment of brain related illnesses and trauma could see the most significant and immediate effects. The next generation of health care IT and sensory devices are acquiring and storing massive amounts of patient related data. An innovative Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) for interactive 3D visualization is presented utilizing the Hadoop Ecosystem for data analysis and storage. The BCI is an implementation of Bayesian factor analysis algorithms that can distinguish distinct thought actions using magneto encephalographic (MEG) brain signals. We have collected data on five subjects yielding 90% positive performance in MEG mid- and post-movement activity. We describe a driver that substitutes the actions of the BCI as mouse button presses for real-time use in visual simulations. This process has been added into a flight visualization demonstration. By thinking left or right, the user experiences the aircraft turning in the chosen direction. The driver components of the BCI can be compiled into any software and substitute a user’s intent for specific keyboard strikes or mouse button presses. The BCI’s data analytics OPEN ACCESS Brain. Sci. 2015, 5 420 of a subject’s MEG brainwaves and flight visualization performance are stored and analyzed using the Hadoop Ecosystem as a quick retrieval data warehouse.

McClay, Wilbert↗