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At least 955 records · Page 53

A Model for Effective Professional Development of Formal Science Educators

The Lunar Workshops for Educators (LWE) series was developed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) education team in 2010 to provide professional development on lunar science and exploration concepts for grades 6-9 science teachers. Over 300 educators have been trained to date. The LWE model incorporates best practices from pedagogical research of science education, thoughtful integration of scientists and engineer subject matter experts for both content presentations and informal networking with educators, access to NASA-unique facilities, hands-on and data-rich activities aligned with education standards, exposure to the practice of science, tools for addressing common misconceptions, follow-up with participants, and extensive evaluation. Evaluation of the LWE model via pre- and post-assessments, daily workshop surveys, and follow-up surveys at 6-month and 1-year intervals indicate that the LWE are extremely effective in increasing educators' content knowledge, confidence in incorporating content into the classroom, understanding of the practice of science, and ability to address common student misconceptions. In order to address the efficacy of the LWE model for other science content areas, the Dynamic Response of Environments at Asteroids, the Moon, and moons of Mars (DREAM2) education team, funded by NASA's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute, developed and ran a pilot workshop called Dream2Explore at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in June, 2015. Dream2Explore utilized the LWE model, but incorporated content related to the science and exploration of asteroids and the moons of Mars. Evaluation results indicate that the LWE model was effectively used for educator professional development on non-lunar content. We will present more detail on the LWE model, evaluation results from the Dream2Explore pilot workshop, and suggestions for the application of the model with other science content for robust educator professional development.

Orbiter↗

Learning the factors controlling mineral dissolution in three-dimensional fracture networks: applications in geologic carbon sequestration

We perform a set of high-fidelity simulations of geochemical reactions within three-dimensional discrete fracture networks (DFN) and use various machine learning techniques to determine the primary factors controlling mineral dissolution. The DFN are partially filled with quartz that gradually dissolves until quasi-steady state conditions are reached. At this point, we measure the quartz remaining in each fracture within the domain as our primary quantity of interest. We observe that a primary sub-network of fractures exists, where the quartz has been fully dissolved out. This reduction in resistance to flow leads to increased flow channelization and reduced solute travel times. However, depending on the DFN topology and the rate of dissolution, we observe substantial variability in the volume of quartz remaining within fractures outside of the primary subnetwork. This variability indicates an interplay between the fracture network structure and geochemical reactions. We characterize the features controlling these processes by developing a machine learning framework to extract their relevant impact. Specifically, we use a combination of high-fidelity simulations with a graph-based approach to study geochemical reactive transport in a complex fracture network to determine the key features that control dissolution. We consider topological, geometric and hydrological features of the fracture network to predict the remaining quartz in quasi-steady state. We found that the dissolution reaction rate constant of quartz and the distance to the primary sub-network in the fracture network are the two most important features controlling the amount of quartz remaining. This study is a first step towards characterizing the parameters that control carbon mineralization using an approach with integrates computational physics and machine learning.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

A Simple XML Producer-Consumer Protocol

There are many different projects from government, academia, and industry that provide services for delivering events in distributed environments. The problem with these event services is that they are not general enough to support all uses and they speak different protocols so that they cannot interoperate. We require such interoperability when we, for example, wish to analyze the performance of an application in a distributed environment. Such an analysis might require performance information from the application, computer systems, networks, and scientific instruments. In this work we propose and evaluate a standard XML-based protocol for the transmission of events in distributed systems. One recent trend in government and academic research is the development and deployment of computational grids. Computational grids are large-scale distributed systems that typically consist of high-performance compute, storage, and networking resources. Examples of such computational grids are the DOE Science Grid, the NASA Information Power Grid (IPG), and the NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computing Infrastructure (PACIs). The major effort to deploy these grids is in the area of developing the software services to allow users to execute applications on these large and diverse sets of resources. These services include security, execution of remote applications, managing remote data, access to information about resources and services, and so on. There are several toolkits for providing these services such as Globus, Legion, and Condor. As part of these efforts to develop computational grids, the Global Grid Forum is working to standardize the protocols and APIs used by various grid services. This standardization will allow interoperability between the client and server software of the toolkits that are providing the grid services. The goal of the Performance Working Group of the Grid Forum is to standardize protocols and representations related to the storage and distribution of performance data. These standard protocols and representations must support tasks such as profiling parallel applications, monitoring the status of computers and networks, and monitoring the performance of services provided by a computational grid. This paper describes a proposed protocol and data representation for the exchange of events in a distributed system. The protocol exchanges messages formatted in XML and it can be layered atop any low-level communication protocol such as TCP or UDP Further, we describe Java and C++ implementations of this protocol and discuss their performance. The next section will provide some further background information. Section 3 describes the main communication patterns of our protocol. Section 4 describes how we represent events and related information using XML. Section 5 describes our protocol and Section 6 discusses the performance of two implementations of the protocol. Finally, an appendix provides the XML Schema definition of our protocol and event information.

Smith, Warren↗

Preliminary Results from NASA/GSFC Ka-Band High Rate Demonstration for Near-Earth Communications

In early 2000, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) commenced the Ka-Band Transition Project (KaTP) as another step towards satisfying wideband communication requirements of the space research and earth exploration-satellite services. The KaTP team upgraded the ground segment portion of NASA's Space Network (SN) in order to enable high data rate space science and earth science services communications. The SN ground segment is located at the White Sands Complex (WSC) in New Mexico. NASA conducted the SN ground segment upgrades in conjunction with space segment upgrades implemented via the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS)-HIJ project. The three new geostationary data relay satellites developed under the TDRS-HIJ project support the use of the inter-satellite service (ISS) allocation in the 25.25-27.5 GHz band (the 26 GHz band) to receive high speed data from low earth-orbiting customer spacecraft. The TDRS H spacecraft (designated TDRS-8) is currently operational at a 171 degrees west longitude. TDRS I and J spacecraft on-orbit testing has been completed. These spacecraft support 650 MHz-wide Ka-band telemetry links that are referred to as return links. The 650 MHz-wide Ka-band telemetry links have the capability to support data rates up to at least 1.2 Gbps. Therefore, the TDRS-HIJ spacecraft will significantly enhance the existing data rate elements of the NASA Space Network that operate at S-band and Ku-band.

Wong, Yen↗

James Webb Space Telescope - L2 Communications for Science Data Processing

JWST is the first NASA mission at the second Lagrange point (L2) to identify the need for data rates higher than 10 megabits per second (Mbps). JWST will produce approximately 235 Gigabits of science data every day that will be downlinked to the Deep Space Network (DSN). To get the data rates desired required moving away from X-band frequencies to Ka-band frequencies. To accomplish this transition, the DSN is upgrading its infrastructure. This new range of frequencies are becoming the new standard for high data rate science missions at L2. With the new frequency range, the issues of alternatives antenna deployment, off nominal scenarios, NASA implementation of the Ka-band 26 GHz, and navigation requirements will be discussed in this paper. JWST is also using Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) standard process for reliable file transfer using CCSDS File Delivery Protocol (CFDP). For JWST the use of the CFDP protocol provides level zero processing at the DSN site. This paper will address NASA implementations of Ground Stations in support of Ka-band 26 GHz and lesson learned from implementing a file base (CFDP) protocol operational system.

Johns, Alan↗

Short Term Plasticity for Artificial Neural Networks

Achieving efficient learning for AI systems was identified as a major challenge in the DOE's recently released, AI for Science , report. The human brain is capable of efficient and low-powered learning. It is likely that implementing brain-like principles will lead to more efficient AI systems. In this LDRD, I aim to contribute to this goal by creating a foundation for implementing and studying a brain phenomenon termed short term plasticity (STP) in spiking artificial neural networks within Sandia. First, data collected by the Allen Institute for Brain Science (AIBS) was analyzed to see if STP could be classified into types using the data collected. Although the data was inadequate at the time, AIBS has updated their database and created models that could be utilized in the future. Second, I began creating a software package to assess the ability of a Boltzmann machine utilizing STP to sample from national security data.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Machine learning-based analysis of COVID-19 pandemic impact on US research networks

Here in this study we explore how fallout from the changing public health policy around COVID-19 has changed how researchers access and process their science experiments. Using a combination of techniques from statistical analysis and machine learning, we conduct a retrospective analysis of historical network data for a period around the stay-at-home orders that took place in March 2020. Our analysis takes data from the entire ESnet infrastructure to explore DOE high-performance computing (HPC) resources at OLCF, ALCF, and NERSC, as well as User sites such as PNNL and JLAB. We look at detecting and quantifying changes in site activity using a combination of t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) and decision tree analysis. Our findings bring insights into the working patterns and impact on data volume movements, particularly during late-night hours and weekends.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

E-PINNs: Epistemic Physics-Informed Neural Networks

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have demonstrated promise as a framework for solving forward and inverse problems involving partial differential equations. Despite recent progress in the field, it remains challenging to quantify uncertainty in these networks. While techniques such as Bayesian PINNs (B-PINNs) provide a principled approach to capturing epistemic uncertainty through Bayesian inference, they can be computationally expensive for large-scale applications. In this work, we propose Epistemic Physics-Informed Neural Networks (E-PINNs), a framework that uses a small network, the epinet, to efficiently quantify epistemic uncertainty in PINNs. The proposed approach works as an add-on to existing, pre-trained PINNs with a small computational overhead. We demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework in various test cases and compare the results with B-PINNs using Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) posterior estimation and dropout-equipped PINNs (Dropout-PINNs). In our experiments, E-PINNs achieve calibrated coverage with competitive sharpness at substantially lower cost. We demonstrate that when B-PINNs produce narrower bands, they under-cover in our tests. E-PINNs also show better calibration than Dropout-PINNs in these examples, indicating a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

AI for Science↗

Computationally Efficient Multiscale Neural Networks Applied to Fluid Flow in Complex 3D Porous Media

Abstract The permeability of complex porous materials is of interest to many engineering disciplines. This quantity can be obtained via direct flow simulation, which provides the most accurate results, but is very computationally expensive. In particular, the simulation convergence time scales poorly as the simulation domains become less porous or more heterogeneous. Semi-analytical models that rely on averaged structural properties (i.e., porosity and tortuosity) have been proposed, but these features only partly summarize the domain, resulting in limited applicability. On the other hand, data-driven machine learning approaches have shown great promise for building more general models by virtue of accounting for the spatial arrangement of the domains’ solid boundaries. However, prior approaches building on the convolutional neural network (ConvNet) literature concerning 2D image recognition problems do not scale well to the large 3D domains required to obtain a representative elementary volume (REV). As such, most prior work focused on homogeneous samples, where a small REV entails that the global nature of fluid flow could be mostly neglected, and accordingly, the memory bottleneck of addressing 3D domains with ConvNets was side-stepped. Therefore, important geometries such as fractures and vuggy domains could not be modeled properly. In this work, we address this limitation with a general multiscale deep learning model that is able to learn from porous media simulation data. By using a coupled set of neural networks that view the domain on different scales, we enable the evaluation of large ( $$>512^3$$ > 512 3 ) images in approximately one second on a single graphics processing unit. This model architecture opens up the possibility of modeling domain sizes that would not be feasible using traditional direct simulation tools on a desktop computer. We validate our method with a laminar fluid flow case using vuggy samples and fractures. As a result of viewing the entire domain at once, our model is able to perform accurate prediction on domains exhibiting a large degree of heterogeneity. We expect the methodology to be applicable to many other transport problems where complex geometries play a central role.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Automated Cloud Based Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network Based SWE Prediction

Snow derived water is a critical component of the US water supply. Measurements of the Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) and associated predictions of peak SWE and snowmelt onset are essential inputs for water management efforts. This paper aims to develop an integrated framework for real-time data ingestion, estimation, prediction and visualization of SWE based on daily snow datasets. In particular, we develop a data-driven approach for estimating and predicting SWE dynamics using the Long Short-Term Memory neural network (LSTM) method. Our approach uses historical datasets (precipitation, air temperature, SWE, and snow thickness) collected at NRCS Snow Telemetry (SNOTEL) stations to train the LSTM network and current year data to predict SWE behavior. The performance of our prediction was compared for different prediction dates and prediction training datasets. Our results suggest that the proposed LSTM network can be an efficient tool for forecasting the SWE timeseries, as well as Peak SWE and snowmelt timing. Results showed that the window size impacts the model performance (where the Nash Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) ranged from 0.96 to 0.85 and the Rooted Mean Square Error (RMSE) ranged from 0.038 to 0.07) with an optimum number that should be calibrated for different stations and climate conditions. In addition, by implementing the LSTM prediction capability in a cloud based site-monitoring platform, we automate model-data integration. By making the data accessible through a graphical web interface and an underlying API which exposes both training and prediction capabilities. The associated results can be made easily accessible to a broad range of stakeholders.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Characterizing Student-Driven Research Investigations Contributed to the GLOBE Program Citizen Science Initiative in a Formal Education Context

The Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) Program offers citizen science opportunities to participants of all ages, with a focus on youth in formal classroom contexts. This study uses student investigation research reports and posters submitted to the 2018 International Virtual Science Symposium (IVSS) and Student Research Symposium (SRS) as testbeds for characterizing student-driven Earth system citizen science investigations. Secondarily, this study aimed to capture GLOBE’s alignment to existing citizen science outcomes frameworks in the literature, which have primarily focused on adults and non-formal settings. Based on a literature review, the evaluation team identified 89 potential characteristics in 27 categories to typify investigations from both formal education and citizen science perspectives. We coded the artifacts from 207 student projects, conducted quantitative analysis of frequencies, and performed a semantic network analysis. By using this networking approach, we conceptually mapped several clusters of co-occurring characteristics, defining a descriptive framework for GLOBE projects. We identified three tiers of citizen science projects, increasing in the sophistication of participants’ demonstrated science practices. The framework includes additional components that reflect student citizen scientists’ thoughtfulness and connection to context as well as their projects’ reflection of their motivation and self efficacy. Through these findings, we have identified areas where student citizen scientists would benefit from further support, and suggest here further research to incorporate the experiences of students into the broader understanding of citizen science outcomes.

network analysis↗

Biomolecular and Characterization Imaging Science Program: 2023 Principal Investigator Meeting Proceedings

The 2023 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program’s Biomolecular Characterization and Imaging Science (BCIS) Principal Investigator Meeting expanded in scope from previous Bioimaging Science Program (BSP) meetings to include BER Structural Biology and Imaging Resources, which are located largely at DOE Office of Science national laboratories. The BCIS meeting was part of BER’s Biological Systems Science Division (BSSD) annual PI meeting, which was held April 17–19, 2023, and featured parallel meetings of the BCIS and Genomic Science programs (GSP). The meetings were held together to encourage networking and idea exchange across technologies and biological application areas, forging new multidisciplinary collaborations among researchers from adjacent BSSD programmatic areas. Two joint BCIS-GSP sessions were held: “BCIS Technologies for Investigating the Rhizosphere” and “Joint Emerging Topics and Technologies.” The rhizosphere session focused on scientific findings from BCIS and GSP PIs, including national laboratory collaborations. The intent was to identify new opportunities to measure and understand the complex community of microbes, roots, and soils that support plant growth under challenging environmental conditions. The emerging technologies session highlighted forward-looking approaches and tools to tackle challenges within the scope of BSSD research on investigating and modifying genomic and molecular function. A final interactive discussion of the BCIS program was led by plenary session chairs.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Optimizing Cryo-Focused Pyrolysis GC/MS for Tracing Soil Organic Matter Across Diverse Ecosystems

The cycling of organic matter in terrestrial soils and sediments is central to a range of biogeochemical processes that regulate nutrient cycling, crop productivity, trace gas emissions, and contaminant transport. Pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (py-GC/MS) is a powerful tool for characterizing bulk soil organic matter (SOM) at the molecular level. In this study, we used a cryo-focused py-GC/MS system to analyze soil samples from seven diverse ecosystems: vernal pool, prairie pothole, temperate forest, tropical forest, tundra, wildfire-affected boreal forest, and grassland. We addressed a key bottleneck in molecular-level SOM characterization by developing an automated data analysis pipeline to optimize py-GC/MS and complementary evolved gas analysis/mass spectrometry (EGA/MS) methods, incorporating advanced tools for peak deconvolution, developing a custom compound class library, and implementing fragmentation spectrum-based molecular networking for the first time. This improved workflow was applied to soil samples from all seven ecosystems, including multiple depths and density fractions. Our findings demonstrate that ecosystem type plays a dominant role in shaping compositional differences in SOM. We also identified trends in the source of SOM compounds (e.g., microbial vs plantderived) across soil depth and density fractions, which are critical for understanding persistence and turnover of SOM. Our molecular networking analysis indicated that although many compounds are widespread across ecosystems, others are restricted to specific environments, such as wetlands. This underscores the utility of molecular-level data in elucidating the complexity of SOM composition and the environmental drivers that shape it. Such molecular-level insights can deepen our knowledge of biogeochemical SOM cycles.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

A phase transition for finding needles in nonlinear haystacks with LASSO artificial neural networks

To fit sparse linear associations, a LASSO sparsity inducing penalty with a single hyperparameter provably allows to recover the important features (needles) with high probability in certain regimes even if the sample size is smaller than the dimension of the input vector (haystack). More recently learners known as artificial neural networks (ANN) have shown great successes in many machine learning tasks, in particular fitting nonlinear associations. Small learning rate, stochastic gradient descent algorithm and large training set help to cope with the explosion in the number of parameters present in deep neural networks. Yet few ANN learners have been developed and studied to find needles in nonlinear haystacks. Driven by a single hyperparameter, our ANN learner, like for sparse linear associations, exhibits a phase transition in the probability of retrieving the needles, which we do not observe with other ANN learners. To select our penalty parameter, we generalize the universal threshold of Donoho and Johnstone (Biometrika 81(3):425–455, 1994) which is a better rule than the conservative (too many false detections) and expensive cross-validation. In the spirit of simulated annealing, we propose a warm-start sparsity inducing algorithm to solve the high-dimensional, non-convex and non-differentiable optimization problem. We perform simulated and real data Monte Carlo experiments to quantify the effectiveness of our approach.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Using spatio-temporal graph neural networks to estimate fleet-wide photovoltaic performance degradation patterns

Accurate estimation of photovoltaic (PV) system performance is crucial for determining its feasibility as a power generation technology and financial asset. PV-based energy solutions offer a viable alternative to traditional energy resources due to their superior Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE). A significant challenge in assessing the LCOE of PV systems lies in understanding the Performance Loss Rate (PLR) for large fleets of PV systems. Estimating the PLR of PV systems becomes increasingly important in the rapidly growing PV industry. Precise PLR estimation benefits PV users by providing real-time monitoring of PV module performance, while explainable PLR estimation assists PV manufacturers in studying and enhancing the performance of their products. However, traditional PLR estimation methods based on statistical models have notable drawbacks. Firstly, they require user knowledge and decision-making. Secondly, they fail to leverage spatial coherence for fleet-level analysis. Additionally, these methods inherently assume the linearity of degradation, which is not representative of real world degradation. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel graph deep learning-based decomposition method called the Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network for fleet-level PLR estimation (PV-stGNN-PLR). PV-stGNN-PLR decomposes the power timeseries data into aging and fluctuation components, utilizing the aging component to estimate PLR. PV-stGNN-PLR exploits spatial and temporal coherence to derive PLR estimation for all systems in a fleet and imposes flatness and smoothness regularization in loss function to ensure the successful disentanglement between aging and fluctuation. We have evaluated PV-stGNN-PLR on three simulated PV datasets consisting of 100 inverters from 5 sites. Experimental results show that PV-stGNN-PLR obtains a reduction of 33.9% and 35.1% on average in Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) and Euclidean Distance (ED) in PLR degradation pattern estimation compared to the state-of-the-art PLR estimation methods.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

A Machine Learning Correction Model of the Winter Clear-Sky Temperature Bias over the Arctic Sea Ice in Atmospheric Reanalyses

Atmospheric reanalyses are widely used to estimate the past atmospheric near-surface state over sea ice. They provide boundary conditions for sea ice and ocean numerical simulations and relevant information for studying polar variability and anthropogenic climate change. Previous research revealed the existence of large near-surface temperature biases (mostly warm) over the Arctic sea ice in the current generation of atmospheric reanalyses, which is linked to a poor representation of the snow over the sea ice and the stably stratified boundary layer in the forecast models used to produce the reanalyses. These errors can compromise the employment of reanalysis products in support of polar research. Here, we train a fully connected neural network that learns from remote sensing infrared temperature observations to correct the existing generation of uncoupled atmospheric reanalyses (ERA5, JRA-55) based on a set of sea ice and atmospheric predictors, which are themselves reanalysis products. The advantages of the proposed correction scheme over previous calibration attempts are the consideration of the synoptic weather and cloud state, compatibility of the predictors with the mechanism responsible for the bias, and a self-emerging seasonality and multidecadal trend consistent with the declining sea ice state in the Arctic. The correction leads on average to a 27% temperature bias reduction for ERA5 and 7% for JRA-55 if compared to independent in situ observations from the MOSAiC campaign (respectively, 32% and 10% under clear-sky conditions). These improvements can be beneficial for forced sea ice and ocean simulations, which rely on reanalyses surface fields as boundary conditions.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Final Report on the 2023 LaserNetUS Annual Meeting

LaserNetUS is a network of advanced laser facilities created by the Department of Energy Fusion Energy Sciences to provide greatly improved access to the most powerful lasers in North America. It is dedicated to the development of the high energy density physics workforce, especially the training and advancement of early career scientists. The network is helping to build a larger, better skilled and more diverse scientific community. The result of the work of LaserNetUS towards these goals was on display at the 2023 LaserNetUS Annual Meeting, held at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland on June 27-29, 2023 (Figure 1). The meeting had 216 participants, the largest sponsor/exhibitor participation of any LaserNetUS annual meeting, wide ranging plenary, invited, and contributed talks, a vigorous poster session, outreach to a diverse range of students, and two awards sessions.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Physics guided machine learning using simplified theories

Recent applications of machine learning, in particular deep learning, motivate the need to address the generalizability of the statistical inference approaches in physical sciences. In this Letter, we introduce a modular physics guided machine learning framework to improve the accuracy of such data-driven predictive engines. The chief idea in our approach is to augment the knowledge of the simplified theories with the underlying learning process. To emphasize their physical importance, our architecture consists of adding certain features at intermediate layers rather than in the input layer. To demonstrate our approach, we select a canonical airfoil aerodynamic problem with the enhancement of the potential flow theory. We include the features obtained by a panel method that can be computed efficiently for an unseen configuration in our training procedure. By addressing the generalizability concerns, our results suggest that the proposed feature enhancement approach can be effectively used in many scientific machine learning applications, especially for the systems where we can use a theoretical, empirical, or simplified model to guide the learning module.

42 ENGINEERING↗