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At least 109 records · Page 6

The second generation intelligent user interface for the crustal dynamics data information system

For the past decade, operations and research projects that support a major portion of NASA's overall mission have experienced a dramatic increase in the volume of generated data and resultant information that is unparalleled in the history of the agency. The effect of such an increase is that most of the science and engineering disciplines are undergoing an information glut, which has occurred, not only because of the amount, but also because of the type of data being collected. This information glut is growing exponentially and is expected to grow for the foreseeable future. Consequently, it is becoming physically and intellectually impossible to identify, access, modify, and analyze the most suitable information. Thus, the dilemma arises that the amount and complexity of information has exceeded and will continue to exceed, using present information systems, the ability of all the scientists and engineers to understand and take advantage of this information. As a result of this information problem, NASA has initiated the Intelligent Data Management (IDM) project to design and develop Advanced Information Management Systems (AIMS). The first effort of the Project was the prototyping of an Intelligent User Interface (IUI) to an operational scientific database using expert systems, natural language processing, and graphics technologies. An overview of the IUI formulation and development for the second phase is presented.

Short, Nicholas, Jr.↗

Hierarchical Semantic Frames for Grounding Language in Robot Control Primitives

As robots become increasingly present in human environments, we need robots to be intuitively commanded by and effectively communicate with humans. In particular, non-expert users should be able to communicate task goals with robots. Language emerges as a logical mode of interaction due to its ubiquity in human environments and, more importantly, as the way humans naturally express tasks. Natural language commands present challenges in that robots must reason over ambiguous language probabilistically and reason over commands they may not be able to execute. We present hierarchical semantic frames , which ground commands in robot control primitives through hierarchies that construct high-level commands from lower-level commands. We demonstrate that hierarchical semantic frames allow robots to understand and execute a variety of commands, such as those involving multiple verb meanings, command variations, and compound nouns. The robot quickly processes hierarchical semantic frames and accurately grounds and executes the commanded tasks, demonstrating the power of hierarchical semantic frames for allowing users to intuitively interact with robots.

Emily Sheetz↗

World, We Have Problems: Simulation for Large Complex, Risky Projects, and Events

Prior to a spacewalk during the NASA STS/129 mission in November 2009, Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) correspondent William Harwood reported astronauts, "were awakened again", as they had been the day previously. Fearing something not properly connected was causing a leak, the crew, both on the ground and in space, stopped and checked everything. The alarm proved false. The crew did complete its work ahead of schedule, but the incident reminds us that correctly connecting hundreds and thousands of entities, subsystems and systems, finding leaks, loosening stuck valves, and adding replacements to very large complex systems over time does not occur magically. Everywhere major projects present similar pressures. Lives are at - risk. Responsibility is heavy. Large natural and human-created disasters introduce parallel difficulties as people work across boundaries their countries, disciplines, languages, and cultures with known immediate dangers as well as the unexpected. NASA has long accepted that when humans have to go where humans cannot go that simulation is the sole solution. The Agency uses simulation to achieve consensus, reduce ambiguity and uncertainty, understand problems, make decisions, support design, do planning and troubleshooting, as well as for operations, training, testing, and evaluation. Simulation is at the heart of all such complex systems, products, projects, programs, and events. Difficult, hazardous short and, especially, long-term activities have a persistent need for simulation from the first insight into a possibly workable idea or answer until the final report perhaps beyond our lifetime is put in the archive. With simulation we create a common mental model, try-out breakdowns of machinery or teamwork, and find opportunity for improvement. Lifecycle simulation proves to be increasingly important as risks and consequences intensify. Across the world, disasters are increasing. We anticipate more of them, as the results of global warming prove more and more ominous-glaciers melting in Bolivia, floods in Saudi Arabia, the Maldives sinking and salt rising along the Nile. Fear grows about potential asteroid crashes and nightly television images raise awareness of victims of floods, hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons, fire, tornado, tsunami, bombings, landslides, and cross-boundary criminality. The Red Cross says that disasters impact 250 million people each year. That means that 700,000 people are having a very bad day today. Modeling and simulation is and must be part of the solution.

Elfrey, Priscilla↗

Scheduling the future NASA Space Network: Experiences with a flexible scheduling prototype

NASA's Space Network (SN) provides telecommunications and tracking services to low earth orbiting spacecraft. One proposal for improving resource allocation and automating conflict resolution for the SN is the concept of flexible scheduling. In this concept, each Payload Operations Control Center (POCC) will possess a Space Network User POCC Interface (SNUPI) to support the development and management of flexible requests. Flexible requests express the flexibility, constraints, and repetitious nature of the user's communications requirements. Flexible scheduling is expected to improve SN resource utilization and user satisfaction, as well as reduce the effort to produce and maintain a schedule. A prototype testbed has been developed to better understand flexible scheduling as it applies to the SN. This testbed consists of a SNUPI workstation, an SN scheduler, and a flexible request language that conveys information between the two systems. All three are being evaluated by operations personnel. Benchmark testing is being conducted on the scheduler to quantify the productivity improvements achieved with flexible requests.

Happell, Nadine↗

The second generation intelligent user interface for the crustal dynamics data information system

For the past decade, operations and research projects that support a major portion of NASA's overall mission have experienced a dramatic increase in the volume of generated data and resultant information that is unparalleled in the history of the agency. The effect of such an increase is that most of the science and engineering disciplines are undergoing an information glut, which has occurred, not only because of the amount, but also because of the type of data being collected. This information glut is growing exponentially and is expected to grow for the foreseeable future. Consequently, it is becoming physically and intellectually impossible to identify, access, modify, and analyze the most suitable information. Thus, the dilemma arises that the amount and complexity of information has exceeded and will continue to exceed, using present information systems, the ability of all the scientists and engineers to understand and take advantage of this information. As a result of this information problem, NASA has initiated the Intelligent Data Management (IDM) project to design and develop Advanced Information Management (IDM) project to design and develop Advanced Information Management Systems (AIMS). The first effort of the Project was the prototyping of an Intelligent User Interface (IUI) to an operational scientific database using expert systems, natural language processing, and graphics technologies. An overview of the IUI formulation and development for the second phase is presented.

Short, Nicholas, Jr.↗

Language models for materials discovery and sustainability: Progress, challenges, and opportunities

Significant advancements have been made in one of the most critical branches of artificial intelligence: natural language processing (NLP). These advancements are exemplified by the remarkable success of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5/4 and the recent release of GPT-4.5, which have sparked a global surge of interest akin to an NLP gold rush. Here, in this article, we offer our perspective on the development and application of NLP and large language models (LLMs) in materials science. We begin by presenting an overview of recent advancements in NLP within the broader scientific landscape, with a particular focus on their relevance to materials science. Next, we examine how NLP can facilitate the understanding and design of novel materials and its potential integration with other methodologies. To highlight key challenges and opportunities, we delve into three specific topics: (i) the limitations of LLMs and their implications for materials science applications, (ii) the creation of a fully automated materials discovery pipeline, and (iii) the potential of GPT-like tools to synthesize existing knowledge and aid in the design of sustainable materials.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

A Semantic Basis for Proof Queries and Transformations

We extend the query language PrQL, designed for inspecting machine representations of proofs, to also allow transformation of proofs. PrQL natively supports hiproofs which express proof structure using hierarchically nested labelled trees, which we claim is a natural way of taming the complexity of huge proofs. Query-driven transformations enable manipulation of this structure, in particular, to transform proofs produced by interactive theorem provers into forms that assist their understanding, or that could be consumed by other tools. In this paper we motivate and define basic transformation operations, using an abstract denotational semantics of hiproofs and queries. This extends our previous semantics for queries based on syntactic tree representations.We define update operations that add and remove sub-proofs, and manipulate the hierarchy to group and ungroup nodes. We show that

Proof Queries↗

Digitizing Today’s Buildings in the Real World: Lessons from Field Demonstrations

Digital twins, created by generating a virtual replica of a building, enable safe evaluation of operational scenarios and applications like fault detection and diagnosis and advanced controls. However, a prerequisite is the creation of a machine-readable digital representation of a building, currently hindered by fragmented information scattered across mechanical drawings, point lists, and natural language sequences. As a result, digital twin development remains labor-intensive, error-prone, and difficult to validate. To address these challenges, two efforts from ASHRAE aim to support the digitalization of buildings. ASHRAE s223 establishes a semantic model of buildings, representing system components, configuration, and data sources. ASHRAE s231 defines a vendor-neutral programming language for expressing their control logic. As the industry evaluates implementing them in their products, understanding the challenges that vendors and implementers may face is crucial. In this paper, we present findings and lessons learned from field demonstrations in five buildings that implemented control applications using ASHRAE s223 and s231. The demonstrations highlight how semantic modeling and formalized control descriptions can significantly reduce software development time, manual point mapping, and hard-coding. Beyond time efficiency, they enable reliable automation by minimizing human interpretation and providing a means for consistency across projects. We describe the processes and best practices for model creation and model usage, from translating heterogeneous building documentation into semantic representations to implementing control logic in real-world systems. Finally, we discuss the challenges that persist, including integration with legacy software environments, gaps in interoperability, and the level of expertise still required to effectively leverage semantic models.

Prakash, Anand Krishnan↗

2022 Spring Internship Exit Presentation

As efforts of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) continue to digitize the air traffic management (ATM) domain, there is countless times of need for downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as named entity recognition, text summarization, classification, and more. Although there are a plethora of open-sourced pre-trained transformer models in the NLP field such as BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, and GPT-3, these models are trained on general corpora and perform poorly on domain-specific terminology and phraseology seen in ATM documents such as Notice to Airmen (NOTAMs) and Letters of Agreement (LoA). Our proposed research objective will be to first gather a large corpus of air traffic management related documents, orders, notices, books, technical papers, conference papers, articles, and other miscellaneous sources of text data from the FAA, NASA, and accredited conference and publication societies. After gathering this data, many steps will have to be taken to collate and preprocess the data into a format understandable by our test transformer models. Thirdly, we will set up training pipelines to train the RoBERTa model on its unsupervised training task masked language modelling (MLM) using resources provided by the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facilities. Finally, these fine-tuned transformer models will be evaluated on their performance on down-stream NLP tasks as mentioned above, to show whether they will be effective when working with ATM related data or not. Once complete, this model could be made open-sourced on the HuggingFace website, where the rest of the ATM community can access and utilize this tool.

NLP↗

Regional and Temporal Variability of Atmospheric River Seasonality: Influences of Detection Algorithms and Moisture Transport Dynamics

Abstract Understanding the regional and temporal variability of atmospheric river (AR) seasonality is crucial for preparedness and mitigation of extreme events. While ARs were thought to peak in winter, recent research shows they exhibit region‐specific seasonality and are heavily influenced by the chosen detection algorithm. This study examines the link between the year‐to‐year consistency of peak‐AR activity to the presence of a dominant seasonal pattern, considering both location and algorithm choice. Regions are categorized by their temporal characteristics: consistent patterns (e.g., East Asia), patterns with occasional outliers (e.g., British Columbia coast), and regions lacking a clear dominant peak season (e.g., South Atlantic, parts of Australia). Hence, not all regions display a consistent seasonal cycle of AR activity. This study quantifies the extent to which a region experiences a dominant peak season of AR activity (or lacks one) and offers insights to enhance decision‐making in water management, natural hazard preparedness, and forecasting. Furthermore, given our finding that detection algorithms influence the peak season of AR activity, we also examine two diagnostic variables representative of moisture transport to corroborate our results. Integrated vapor transport, which captures meridional and zonal moisture transport, and Moist Wave Activity, representing moisture intrusions from lower to higher latitudes, are examined. Our analysis indicates that inconsistencies in the seasonal cycle of AR activity are not solely due to discrepancies in detection algorithms but also arise from changes in moisture transport. Plain Language Summary Atmospheric rivers (ARs) are critical weather phenomena that can cause extreme events like heavy rainfall and flooding. Understanding when and where ARs are most likely to occur throughout the year is essential for preparing and responding to these events. Traditionally, ARs were thought to peak in winter, but recent studies show this varies by region. Our study helps address the challenge decision‐makers face in anticipating and preparing for AR events by providing insights into the consistency of peak seasonal patterns across different areas. Some regions, like East Asia, and the British Columbia coast, show a consistent peak season, while others, like the South Atlantic and parts of Australia, have significant year‐to‐year variations, making it hard to identify a dominant season. To better understand these changes over time, the study also examines how moisture moves in the atmosphere, using Integrated Vapor Transport (which looks at moisture movement in various directions) and Moist Wave Activity (which tracks moisture shifts from lower to higher latitudes). The findings suggest that inconsistencies in AR patterns are due not only to detection methods but also due to changes in moisture transport. Key Points The peak season of atmospheric river activity can change depending on the year in some areas Interannual variations in the peak season can make identifying a dominant season challenging for some regions Frequent shifts in peak season across years reflect inconsistencies tied to detection algorithms and to underlying dynamics

Kamnani, Diya↗

Exploring Saccharomycotina Yeast Ecology Through an Ecological Ontology Framework

Yeasts in the subphylum Saccharomycotina are found across the globe in disparate ecosystems. A major aim of yeast research is to understand the diversity and evolution of ecological traits, such as carbon metabolic breadth, insect association, and cactophily. This includes studying aspects of ecological traits like genetic architecture or association with other phenotypic traits. Genomic resources in the Saccharomycotina have grown rapidly. Ecological data, however, are still limited for many species, especially those only known from species descriptions where usually only a limited number of strains are studied. Moreover, ecological information is recorded in natural language format limiting high throughput computational analysis. To address these limitations, we developed an ontological framework for the analysis of yeast ecology. A total of 1,088 yeast strains were added to the Ontology of Yeast Environments (OYE) and analyzed in a machine-learning framework to connect genotype to ecology. This framework is flexible and can be extended to additional isolates, species, or environmental sequencing data. Widespread adoption of OYE would greatly aid the study of macroecology in the Saccharomycotina subphylum.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

GATOR: Requirements capturing of telephony features

We are developing a natural language-based, requirements gathering system called GATOR (for the GATherer Of Requirements). GATOR assists in the development of more accurate and complete specifications of new telephony features. GATOR interacts with a feature designer who describes a new feature, set of features, or capability to be implemented. The system aids this individual in the specification process by asking for clarifications when potential ambiguities are present, by identifying potential conflicts with other existing features, and by presenting its understanding of the feature to the designer. Through user interaction with a model of the existing telephony feature set, GATOR constructs a formal representation of the new, 'to be implemented' feature. Ultimately GATOR will produce a requirements document and will maintain an internal representation of this feature to aid in future design and specification. This paper consists of three sections that describe (1) the structure of GATOR, (2) POND, GATOR's internal knowledge representation language, and (3) current research issues.

Dankel, Douglas D., II↗

Automated Instrumentation and Monitoring of Data Movement for Parallel Programs

Writing efficient parallel programs is complicated by the need to select the right data structure alignments and distributions, which determine the nature and volume of inter-processor communications. A large number of performance tools for parallel programs have been developed recently to expose these inter-processor communications. However, none of them support performance views or provide statistics in terms of inter-processor data structure interactions. A performance tool that tracks the interaction between individual data structures and the context of these interactions is essential for understanding the performance of both explicit message passing programs and data-parallel languages such as HPF. In this paper we discuss the use of compiler front end tools for automatically tracking data structure movements in message passing programs, and low-overhead monitoring and postprocessing of such codes. We demonstrate that robust instrumentation and low overhead monitoring of inter-processor data structure movements is possible, with the use of a number of NAS benchmark codes, run on the i860 hypercube. We also show that the data so collected can be used effectively by post processing tools that expose performance bottlenecks using graphical displays and performance statistics.

Sarukkai, Sekhar↗

Artificial Intelligence for Natural Gas Utilities: A Primer

Modern natural gas utilities face numerous challenges and competing priorities from various stakeholders. Policymakers, customers, and advocacy groups want to see gas utilities improve performance on safety, reliability, resilience, affordability, and environmental stewardship. State utility regulators — public utility commissions — are responsible for overseeing utility performance, ensuring that ratepayer funds are being spent in the public interest, and aligning utility goals with public goals. The use of new technologies is critical to enabling cost-effective performance on these attributes. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a widely used term among utilities and regulators, but the term means different things to different stakeholders, and it is often used to describe data analytics approaches that fall short of the formal definition of AI, which is: “…the ability of a machine to receive inputs and produce a behavior or reaction similar to that of an intelligent human being.” AI (and related tools, techniques, and technologies) can help utilities solve current and emerging challenges. By combining customer and system data with analytical tools and technologies, AI can augment human decision-makers by assisting in identifying problems and events before they occur, enabling resources to be more efficiently directed across utility infrastructure. The intended primary audience for this primer is state regulators, although utilities and other stakeholders might also find it useful and relevant to improve their awareness of AI. The objectives of this primer are to: (a) offer a set of broadly applicable definitions for AI and related terms, allowing regulators, utilities, and other stakeholders to speak the same language; (b) discuss how AI is currently being implemented in the gas utility sector; and (c) understand the challenges affecting AI solutions and how tools might be implemented in the future. This primer fits within NARUC’s goals of providing impartial information to improve the ability of public utility commissions to regulate in the public interest. As such, this primer does not seek to recommend AI over any other investment, nor does it endorse any particular vendor, product, or approach. It does seek to prepare state regulators to oversee AI investments by sharing information about the current landscape of commercially available tools. To these ends, the primer is organized as follows: Section I discusses the current environment in which natural gas utilities operate and how AI, when thoughtfully designed and implemented, can enable utilities to achieve performance goals; Section II offers definitions of AI and related terms within the data analytics discipline; Section III provides three current opportunities for which AI can offer solutions: replacing aging gas distribution infrastructure, preventing excavator damage to gas distribution infrastructure, and improving energy efficiency programs. This section discusses each problem statement in detail. Second, Section III includes a discussion of how costs and benefits of investments to solve each problem are measured. And third, this section offers real-world examples of utility implementation of AI solutions; Section IV discusses challenges with implementing AI, both from the perspective of utilities and regulators; Section V suggests areas in which AI could feasibly be implemented in the near future; Finally, Section VI offers concluding thoughts and areas for further research.

03 NATURAL GAS↗

SHAPER: can you hear the shape of a jet?

The identification of interesting substructures within jets is an important tool for searching for new physics and probing the Standard Model at colliders. Many of these substructure tools have previously been shown to take the form of optimal transport problems, in particular the Energy Mover’s Distance (EMD). In this work, we show that the EMD is in fact the natural structure for comparing collider events, which accounts for its recent success in understanding event and jet substructure. We then present a Shape Hunting Algorithm using Parameterized Energy Reconstruction (SHAPER), which is a general framework for defining and computing shape-based observables. SHAPER generalizes N-jettiness from point clusters to any extended, parametrizable shape. This is accomplished by efficiently minimizing the EMD between events and parameterized manifolds of energy flows representing idealized shapes, implemented using the dual-potential Sinkhorn approximation of the Wasserstein metric. We show how the geometric language of observables as manifolds can be used to define novel observables with built-in infrared-and-collinear safety. We demonstrate the efficacy of the SHAPER framework by performing empirical jet substructure studies using several examples of new shape-based observables.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

TransPolymer: a Transformer-based language model for polymer property predictions

Accurate and efficient prediction of polymer properties is of great significance in polymer design. Conventionally, expensive and time-consuming experiments or simulations are required to evaluate polymer functions. Recently, Transformer models, equipped with self-attention mechanisms, have exhibited superior performance in natural language processing. However, such methods have not been investigated in polymer sciences. Herein, we report TransPolymer, a Transformer-based language model for polymer property prediction. Our proposed polymer tokenizer with chemical awareness enables learning representations from polymer sequences. Rigorous experiments on ten polymer property prediction benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of TransPolymer. Moreover, we show that TransPolymer benefits from pretraining on large unlabeled dataset via Masked Language Modeling. Experimental results further manifest the important role of self-attention in modeling polymer sequences. We highlight this model as a promising computational tool for promoting rational polymer design and understanding structure-property relationships from a data science view.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Opportunistic Short‐Term Water Uptake Dynamics by Subalpine Trees Observed via In Situ Water Isotope Measurements

Abstract Variations in tree water sources are important to understand in semi‐arid ecosystems because climatic shifts towards lower snowpack and increased drought affect water availability in subalpine forests of the western US. Here, we use daily in situ measurements of stable isotopes ( 2 H & 18 O) in soil and tree stem water, soil matric potential and sap flow to study tree water uptake dynamics. We instrumented three soil profiles down to 90 cm, as well as three aspen and engelmann spruce trees near Gothic, Colorado, in the East River watershed. We observed the fate of natural isotopic variations in rainfall, soil, and plants from June to October 2022, and in August 2023 we conducted a 2 H labeled irrigation experiment. Our observations showed that all studied aspen trees compensated for water scarcity in the shallow soil by shifting the dominant water source at 60(±20) cm to ⅔ of uptake from 90 cm within a few days of a dry period. Both species relied on snowmelt stored in the subsoil to sustain transpiration. Intense rainfall caused the plant water uptake to shift partially to top soil layers within 2 days. Spruce transpiration was lower and relied more on snowmelt, because rainfall infiltration was low in the spruce stand due to high canopy interception. Our findings highlight the important role of snowmelt stored in the deep soil layers for subalpine forest drought response and the dominant fate of monsoonal rainfall to become transpiration rather than recharging groundwater and streams in the Upper Colorado River. Plain Language Summary There is a need to understand how trees in mountainous regions respond to dry conditions that lead to water scarcity, because climate projections suggest that such conditions will become more frequent in the future. Here we present a novel data set of measurements of daily stable isotopes of water across soil profiles and in tree stems of aspen and spruce. Our data show that when the upper soil dried out, aspen trees shifted to using water from deeper layers (beneath 60 cm) to keep transpiring. For spruce trees the uptake pattern is less clear, but both types of trees mainly used snowmelt stored in the deeper soil layers to survive the dry summer. After heavy rain, aspen and spruce trees switched to using water from the top 20 cm of soil. However, for spruce, only some rain reached the soil because the dense tree canopy intercepted it, so spruce trees stayed more dependent on snowmelt and used less water overall. This study shows how important deep snowmelt water is for helping forests survive dry periods and suggests that most summer rain is quickly used by trees rather than replenishing streams and groundwater in the headwaters of the Colorado River. Key Points Tree water resources changed within a few days from snow dominated to higher share of rainfall as soils wetted up after a dry period Compensatory plant water uptake by aspen from the deep layer (90 cm), while uptake from soil depths that became drier (60 cm) declined Strong differences between water sources and availability beneath aspen and spruce, respectively

Sprenger, Matthias↗

Interpreting and Accelerating Transformers for Jet Tagging

Attention-based transformers are ubiquitous in machine learning applications from natural language processing to computer vision. In high energy physics, one central application is to classify collimated particle showers in colliders based on the particle of origin, known as jet tagging. In this work, we study the interpretatbility and prospects for acceleration of Particle Transformer (ParT), a state-of-the-art model, leverages particle-level attention to improve jet-tagging performance. We analyzing ParT's attention maps and particle-pair correlations in the eta-phi plane, revealing intriguing features, such as a binary attention pattern that identifies critical substructure in jets. These insights enhance our understanding of the model's internal workings and learning process and hint at ways to improve its efficiency. Along these lines, we also explore low-rank attention, attention alternatives, and dynamic quantization to accelerate transformers for jet tagging. With quantization, we achieve a 50% reduction in model size and a 10% increase in inference speed without compromising accuracy. These combined efforts enhance both the performance and the interpretability of transformers in high-energy physics, opening avenues for more efficient and physics-driven model designs.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗