Challenges of Data Stewardship for the LANL Weapons Program (and Some Solutions!)
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The Department of Energy's (DOE) Geothermal Data Repository (GDR) team has implemented data standards and automated data pipelines for the following data types: 1) drilling data, 2) geospatial datasets, and 3) DAS data. An additional data pipeline is proposed for stimulation data. These data standards and pipelines are intended to improve the real-world applicability of geothermal machine learning outputs through improving the quality of data. More specifically, through standardizing high-value datasets, the GDR is reducing project-specific data curation requirements, allowing more time to be spent on actual research. By automating this process, the burden of standardization is taken off of the user, overall increasing the availability of standardized data. This paper provides an update on the GDR's transition toward data standardization through automated data pipelines and calls for feedback from the community on how we can improve this process.
The Department of Energy's (DOE) Geothermal Data Repository (GDR) team has implemented data standards and automated data pipelines for the following data types: 1) drilling data, 2) geospatial datasets, and 3) DAS data. An additional data pipeline is proposed for stimulation data. These data standards and pipelines are intended to improve the real-world applicability of geothermal machine learning outputs through improving the quality of data. More specifically, through standardizing high-value datasets, the GDR is reducing project-specific data curation requirements, allowing more time to be spent on actual research. By automating this process, the burden of standardization is taken off of the user, overall increasing the availability of standardized data. This paper provides an update on the GDR's transition toward data standardization through automated data pipelines and calls for feedback from the community on how we can improve this process.
The Department of Energy's (DOE) Geothermal Data Repository (GDR) team has implemented or is currently implementing data standards and automated data pipelines for the following geothermal data types: 1) drilling data, 2) geospatial datasets, and 3) Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) data. These data standards and pipelines are intended to improve the real-world applicability of geothermal machine learning outputs through improving the quality of data. More specifically, through standardizing high-value datasets, the GDR is reducing project-specific data curation requirements, allowing more time to be spent on actual research. By automating this process, the burden of standardization is taken off of the user, overall increasing the availability of standardized data. This paper provides an update on the GDR's transition toward data standardization through automated data pipelines and calls for feedback from the community on how the GDR team can improve this process.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has initiated an effort to provide stakeholder support services as part of Phase II of the Constraints to Implementing Decommissioning and Environmental Remediation (CIDER II) programs. The intent of this sub-group of CIDER II is to provide members states support in areas of stakeholder communication, engagement and participation, with the goal of building trust in decommissioning and environmental remediation (D and ER) decisions for radioactive contamination and facilities. IAEA has also initiated a follow-on effort to address Modeling and Data for Radiological Impact Assessments (MODARIA II), which is aimed at enhancing the capabilities of Member States to simulate radionuclide transfer in the environment, and to ensure appropriate levels of protection from ionizing radiation. Working Group 1 of MODARIA II is focused on the integration of modeling and decision analysis. These two groups have complementary and supporting objectives, which provides an opportunity for collaboration and mutual benefit. The technical integrator is the approach of structured decision making, which follows a five-step process that combines stakeholder values with models through a technically defensible decision analysis. Briefly, the steps are: 1. Provide the context and decision context for the problem; 2. Obtain costs, values and concerns from stakeholders, to develop objectives that need to be achieved (e.g., improve human health, minimize costs, increase jobs); 3. Identify options that might achieve the objectives (e.g., cleanup, institutional controls, education); 4. Develop probabilistic models that connect options to objectives so that the objectives can be evaluated collectively (e.g., a fate and transport and risk model to address the objective of reducing human health risk, a cost model to address costs of taking action); and, 5. Model evaluation, including sensitivity analysis, to determine if an action can be taken with sufficient certainty, or if collection of more data is needed to decrease uncertainty before a decision is made. This approach also supports adaptive management as new data are collected. This approach clarifies the roles of stakeholders and subject matter experts in the decision-making process, where stakeholders specify values, and subject matter experts focus on the models that are needed to evaluate the options. It also provides a technically defensible, reproducible, transparent and traceable approach to all of the components necessary to properly solve the types of complex decision problems that plague radioactive waste management, decommissioning and environmental remediation. This paper introduces the major challenges to implementing such a broad scale of decision analysis, and approaches to overcoming those challenges, which include not only the technical challenges, but also the need to develop capacity in a range of skills not usually accommodated in environmental modeling and includes the need for the IAEA to address decision making in different countries, and with different cultures, religions, political affiliations, and languages. This paper explores the potential for IAEA to benefit from both the CIDER II and MODARIA II programs, and hence to develop a fully integrated approach to effective decision making for radioactive waste management and environmental remediation. Note that there are many people involved in these efforts at the IAEA, and credit belongs to those people for the progress that has been made to date. Our intent here is simply to introduce these IAEA programs at the WM2018 Symposium to provide our perspective and some awareness of some of the directions in which IAEA appears to be headed regarding stakeholder engagement, environmental and risk modeling, data science, and decision analysis. (authors)
The United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program Plant Modernization Pathway is conducting targeted research and development (R&D) to address aging and reliability concerns with the legacy instrumentation and control and related information systems of the U.S. LWR fleet. In this effort, the application of human factors engineering (HFE) provides an important role in ensuring new digital plant technologies enable broad innovation and business improvement with continued operational safety. Evaluation is a key activity in HFE, which often occurs iteratively through the system design lifecycle. While qualitative methods are important in collecting information of how users perform tasks through observations, quantitative methods are equally important in assessing system design based on performance. In collecting and analyzing this quantitative data, there are notable challenges in the nuclear HFE domain that may threaten the validity and reliability of the inferences made in these studies. Notable challenges include small sample size and limited resources, large error variance and small effect size, an “adding test features to losing degrees of freedom” dilemma, non-normal distribution, and heterogeneity of variance. The results in control room usability studies are often statistically non-significant, which makes it hard to interpret. This work discusses these challenges across different scientific viewpoints and provides real-world examples of these challenges in practice. Collectively, the objective of this work is to position these challenges to the larger data science community as a means of identifying future opportunities to address these issues.
The rapid growth of the field of Machine Learning Inter-Atomic Potentials (MLIAP) has lead to a profusion of methods, all of which have some similarity to each other, but each also restricted to particular design choices, often arrived at in a rather ad hoc fashion. Beyond anecdotal evidence, and some benchmarking studies on specific problems, little progress has been made in developing design principles for MLIAPs. The goal of this project is to use machine learning, data science, and uncertainty quantification methods to optimize the design choices for MLIAP.
The Department of Energy's (DOE) Geothermal Data Repository (GDR) has implemented improvements to both its data lakes and its data standards and automated data pipelines. The GDR data lakes have reduced storage and compute-related barriers to using large geothermal datasets, enabling these large datasets to be accessed by anyone with a modern computer and internet access. More recently, the GDR has been working to further reduce barriers through streamlining the data intake process, educating users on the process and requirements, and aiding users in accessing data from the data lakes. These improvements have augmented the quantity of datasets the GDR is able to accept into its data lakes and have enabled users who are new to cloud tools to access these datasets more easily, overall increasing the accessibility of big geothermal data for use in machine learning and other projects. In addition, the GDR now has built-in data standards and pipelines for drilling data, geospatial data, and distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data. These standardization efforts aim to enhance the real-world applicability of geothermal machine learning outcomes by improving the quality of training data. Specifically, through standardizing high-value datasets, the GDR is reducing project-specific data curation requirements, thus allowing more time for actual research. By automating this process, the burden of standardization is lifted from the user, ultimately increasing the availability of standardized data.
The Department of Energy's (DOE's) Geothermal Data Repository (GDR) has implemented improvements to both its data lakes and its data standards and automated data pipelines. The GDR data lakes have reduced storage and compute-related barriers to using large geothermal datasets, enabling these large datasets to be accessed by anyone with a modern computer and internet access. More recently, the GDR has been working to further reduce barriers through streamlining the data intake process, educating users on the process and requirements, and helping users access data from the data lakes. These improvements have augmented the quantity of datasets the GDR is able to accept into its data lakes and have enabled users who are new to cloud tools to access these datasets more easily, overall increasing the accessibility of big geothermal data for use in machine learning and other projects. In addition, the GDR now has built-in data standards and pipelines for drilling data, geospatial data, and distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) data. These standardization efforts aim to enhance the real-world applicability of geothermal machine learning outcomes by improving the quality of training data. Specifically, through standardizing high-value datasets, the GDR is reducing project-specific data curation requirements, thus allowing more time for actual research. By automating this process, the burden of standardization is lifted from the user, ultimately increasing the availability of standardized data. This paper provides an update on recent improvements made to the GDR's data lakes and automated data pipelines, including: (1) streamlining the data lake intake process, (2) better educating users on the process and requirements through a new data lakes page, (3) adding data lake direct access links to GDR data lake submission pages, (4) implementing a DAS data pipeline to convert DAS data uploaded in SEG-Y format to a standardized hierarchical data format v5 (HDF5), (5) extending this pipeline to encompass data in the GDR data lake, (6) adding metadata requirements for geospatial data, (7) making user interface/user experience (UX) enhancements to the data pipelines' documentation pages, and (8) improving the GDR's data standards and pipelines pages to better guide users in ensuring that their data is standardized by the GDR's automated data pipelines. 2024 Geothermal Resources Council. All rights reserved.
This chapter presents an introduction to some of the key dimensionality reduction methods currently used in data science. The intended audience is pure mathematicians. The chapter puts special emphasis on connecting the fundamental ideas in dimensionality reduction to a diverse set of mathematical domains, including geometry, dynamical systems, representation theory, and category theory.
The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment is searching for dark matter interactions in a liquid xenon time projection chamber (LXe-TPC). This article demonstrates how control of the flow state in the LXe-TPC enables the identification of pairs of sequential alpha-decays, which are used to map fluid flow and ion drift in the liquid target. The resulting transport model is used to tag $^{214}$Pb beta-decays, a leading background to dark matter signals in LZ. Temporally evolving volume selections, at a cost of 9.0% of exposure, target the decay of each $^{214}$Pb atom up to 81 minutes after production, resulting in (63 $\pm$ 6$_{\mathrm{stat}}$ $\pm$ 7$_{\mathrm{sys}}$)% identification of $^{214}$Pb decays to ground state. We also demonstrate how flow-based tagging techniques enable a novel calibration side band that is concurrent with science data.
This is a summary of geothermal work done at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Fiscal Year 2025. This year brought increased attention to the geothermal industry and NREL's geothermal research portfolio. With more than 70 active projects, NREL research spanned the areas of resource exploration and characterization; conventional and next-generation geothermal technologies; subsurface thermal energy storage; heating and cooling; co-production of geothermal with critical minerals and oil and gas; modeling and analysis leveraging expertise in data science and machine learning; and more.
This is a summary of geothermal work done at the National Laboratory of the Rockies in Fiscal Year 2025. This year brought increased attention to the geothermal industry and NLR's geothermal research portfolio. With more than 70 active projects, NLR research spanned the areas of resource exploration and characterization; conventional and next-generation geothermal technologies; subsurface thermal energy storage; heating and cooling; co-production of geothermal with critical minerals and oil and gas; modeling and analysis leveraging expertise in data science and machine learning; and more.
Serial crystallography data can be challenging to index, as each frame is processed individually, rather than being processed as a whole like in conventional X-ray single-crystal crystallography. An algorithm has been developed to index still diffraction patterns arising from small-unit-cell samples. The algorithm is based on the matching of reciprocal-lattice vector pairs, as developed for Laue microdiffraction data indexing, combined with three-dimensional pattern matching using a nearest-neighbors approach. As a result, large-bandpass data (e.g. 5–24 keV energy range) and monochromatic data can be processed, the main requirement being prior knowledge of the unit cell. Furthermore, angles calculated in the vicinity of a few theoretical and experimental reciprocal-lattice vectors are compared, and only vectors with the highest number of common angles are selected as candidates to obtain the orientation matrix. Global matching on the entire pattern is then checked. Four indexing options are available, two for the ranking of the theoretical reciprocal-lattice vectors and two for reducing the number of possible candidates. Furthermore, the algorithm has been used to index several data sets collected under different experimental conditions on a series of model samples. Additionally, knowing the crystallographic structure of the sample and using this information to rank the theoretical reflections based on the structure factors helps the indexing of large-bandpass data for the largest-unit-cell samples. For small-bandpass data, shortening the candidate list to determine the orientation matrix should be based on matching pairs of reciprocal-lattice vectors instead of triplet matching.
The Materials Project was launched formally in 2011 to drive materials discovery forwards through high-throughput computation and open data. More than a decade later, the Materials Project has become an indispensable tool used by more than 600,000 materials researchers around the world. This Perspective describes how the Materials Project, as a data platform and a software ecosystem, has helped to shape research in data-driven materials science. We cover how sustainable software and computational methods have accelerated materials design while becoming more open source and collaborative in nature. Next, we present cases where the Materials Project was used to understand and discover functional materials. We then describe our efforts to meet the needs of an expanding user base, through technical infrastructure updates ranging from data architecture and cloud resources to interactive web applications. Finally, we discuss opportunities to better aid the research community, with the vision that more accessible and easy-to-understand materials data will result in democratized materials knowledge and an increasingly collaborative community.
In modern science, big data plays an increasingly important role. Many scientific applications, such as running simulations on supercomputers or conducting experiments on advanced instruments, produce huge amount of data at unprecedented speed. Analyzing and understanding such big data is the key for scientists to make scientific breakthroughs. However, data might become unavailable for scientists to access when outages or maintenance of the storage system occur, which severely hinders scientific discovery. To improve the data availability, data duplication and erasure coding (EC) are often used. But as the scientific data gets larger, using these two methods can cause considerable storage and network overhead.In this paper, we propose RAPIDS, a hybrid approach that combines the multigrid-based error-bounded lossy compression with erasure coding, to significantly reduce the storage and network overhead required for maintaining high data availability. Our experiments show that RAPIDS reduces the storage overhead by up to 7.5x and network overhead by up to 3x to achieve the same level of availability compared to the regular EC method. We improve RAPIDS by building two models to optimize the fault tolerance configurations and data gathering strategy. We demonstrate that RAPIDS significantly improves performance when running on many CPU cores in parallel or on GPUs.
The ENDF/B-VIII.1 library is the newest recommended evaluated nuclear data file by the Cross Section Evaluation Working Group (CSEWG) for use in nuclear science and technology applications, and incorporates advances made in the six years since the release of ENDF/B-VIII.0. Among key advances made are that the 239 Pu file was reevaluated by a joint international effort and that updated 16,18 O, 19 F, 28–30 Si, 50–54 Cr, 55 Mn, 54,56,57 Fe, 63,65 Cu, 139 La, 233,235,238 U, and 240,241 Pu neutron nuclear data from the IAEA coordinated INDEN collaboration were adopted. Over 60 neutron dosimetry cross sections were adopted from the IAEA's IRDFF-II library. In addition, the new library includes significant changes for 3 He, 6 Li, 9 Be, 51 V, 88 Sr, 103 Rh, 140,142 Ce, Dy, 181 Ta, Pt, 206–208 Pb, and 234,236 U neutron data, and new nuclear data for the photonuclear, charged-particle and atomic sublibraries. Numerous thermal neutron scattering kernels were reevaluated or provided for the very first time. On the covariance side, work was undertaken to introduce better uncertainty quantification standards and testing for nuclear data covariances. The significant effort to reevaluate important nuclides has reduced bias in the simulations of many integral experiments with particular progress noted for fluorine, copper, and stainless steel containing benchmarks. Data issues hindered the successful deployment of the previous ENDF/B-VIII.0 for commercial nuclear power applications in high burnup situations. These issues were addressed by improving the 238 U and 239,240,241 Pu evaluated data in the resonance region. The new library performance as a function of burnup is similar to the reference ENDF/B-VII.1 library.
Abstract Efficiently extracting data from tables in the scientific literature is pivotal for building large‐scale databases. However, the tables reported in materials science papers exist in highly diverse forms; thus, rule‐based extractions are an ineffective approach. To overcome this challenge, the study presents MaTableGPT, which is a GPT‐based table data extractor from the materials science literature. MaTableGPT features key strategies of table data representation and table splitting for better GPT comprehension and filtering hallucinated information through follow‐up questions. When applied to a vast volume of water splitting catalysis literature, MaTableGPT achieves an extraction accuracy (total F1 score) of up to 96.8%. Through comprehensive evaluations of the GPT usage cost, labeling cost, and extraction accuracy for the learning methods of zero‐shot, few‐shot, and fine‐tuning, the study presents a Pareto‐front mapping where the few‐shot learning method is found to be the most balanced solution owing to both its high extraction accuracy (total F1 score >95%) and low cost (GPT usage cost of 5.97 US dollars and labeling cost of 10 I/O paired examples). The statistical analyses conducted on the database generated by MaTableGPT revealed valuable insights into the distribution of the overpotential and elemental utilization across the reported catalysts in the water splitting literature.