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117 records · Page 7

Machine Learning for Automated Extraction of Building Geometry

As data science comes to buildings, the promise of using machine learning and novel sources of data has received much attention. Advances in machine learning and computer vision algorithms, combined with increased access to unstructured data (e.g., images and text), have created an opportunity for automated extraction of building characteristics – cost-effectively, and at scale. Acquisition of features such as footprint are time consuming and costly to acquire with today’s manual methods, but can be streamlined through intelligent software-based solutions applied to satellite images. When combined with aerial RGB and thermal images, full 3D geometries and thermal maps can be constructed to determine additional characteristics such as window to wall ratio, height, number of stories and envelope thermal characteristics. In this paper we present three contributions to accelerate these high potential opportunities: (1) a methodical analysis of how these features can be integrated into today’s simulation and data driven software tools to enhance efficiency measure identification and owner/operator decision making; (2) development and accuracy testing of open source deep neural network methods to extract building footprints from satellite imagery, including the curation and application of openly available GIS datasets for training and continued development by others; and (3) an open framework for drone-based image capture and creation of 3D building geometries. This work represents an important bridge between high-level studies that span diverse application areas and those that detail point solutions yet cannot be easily replicated or extended.

Touzani, Samir↗

Finding Atmospheric Composition (AC) Metadata

The Atmospheric Composition Portal (ACP) is an aggregator and curator of information related to remotely sensed atmospheric composition data and analysis. It uses existing tools and technologies and, where needed, enhances those capabilities to provide interoperable access, tools, and contextual guidance for scientists and value-adding organizations using remotely sensed atmospheric composition data. The initial focus is on Essential Climate Variables identified by the Global Climate Observing System CH4, CO, CO2, NO2, O3, SO2 and aerosols. This poster addresses our efforts in building the ACP Data Table, an interface to help discover and understand remotely sensed data that are related to atmospheric composition science and applications. We harvested GCMD, CWIC, GEOSS metadata catalogs using machine to machine technologies - OpenSearch, Web Services. We also manually investigated the plethora of CEOS data providers portals and other catalogs where that data might be aggregated. This poster is our experience of the excellence, variety, and challenges we encountered.Conclusions:1.The significant benefits that the major catalogs provide are their machine to machine tools like OpenSearch and Web Services rather than any GUI usability improvements due to the large amount of data in their catalog.2.There is a trend at the large catalogs towards simulating small data provider portals through advanced services. 3.Populating metadata catalogs using ISO19115 is too complex for users to do in a consistent way, difficult to parse visually or with XML libraries, and too complex for Java XML binders like CASTOR.4.The ability to search for Ids first and then for data (GCMD and ECHO) is better for machine to machine operations rather than the timeouts experienced when returning the entire metadata entry at once. 5.Metadata harvest and export activities between the major catalogs has led to a significant amount of duplication. (This is currently being addressed) 6.Most (if not all) Earth science atmospheric composition data providers store a reference to their data at GCMD.

metadata search↗

Term Matrix: a novel Gene Ontology annotation quality control system based on ontology term co-annotation patterns

Biological processes are accomplished by the coordinated action of gene products. Gene products often participate in multiple processes, and can therefore be annotated to multiple Gene Ontology (GO) terms. Nevertheless, processes that are functionally, temporally and/or spatially distant may have few gene products in common, and co-annotation to unrelated processes probably reflects errors in literature curation, ontology structure or automated annotation pipelines. We have developed an annotation quality control workflow that uses rules based on mutually exclusive processes to detect annotation errors, based on and validated by case studies including the three we present here: fission yeast protein-coding gene annotations over time; annotations for cohesin complex subunits in human and model species; and annotations using a selected set of GO biological process terms in human and five model species. For each case study, we reviewed available GO annotations, identified pairs of biological processes which are unlikely to be correctly co-annotated to the same gene products (e.g. amino acid metabolism and cytokinesis), and traced erroneous annotations to their sources. To date we have generated 107 quality control rules, and corrected 289 manual annotations in eukaryotes and over 52 700 automatically propagated annotations across all taxa.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Improving Cyber Situational Understanding

Effective cybersecurity operations require the ability to analyze large amounts of information to assess security risks and formulate defensive strategies against adversaries. This has become more complex in recent years as the sprawl and interconnectivity of devices grows through implementation of virtualization, cloud computing, and Internet of Things (IoT). The amount of data and analysis required for effective cybersecurity command and control decisions far exceeds humans’ capacity to perform manually. We characterize the analysis problem as cyber situational understanding. The research presented to improve cyber situational understanding focuses on vulnerability analysis and threat intelligence. Regarding vulnerabilities, entities must analyze and plan work for between thousands and tens of thousands of software vulnerabilities annually. Entities heavily use network firewalls to limit vulnerability exposure. As a result, some of these vulnerabilities permit exposure to adversarial exploitation, whereas others are inaccessible and therefore present negligible risk of exploitation. Distinguishing between high and low risk software vulnerabilities requires a deep understanding of the vulnerability, network firewall protection, and characteristics of the targeted device. This problem is solved by extracting network service features from vulnerability data features using both machine-learning and natural language processing. Then, the network firewall topology is parsed to determine which vulnerabilities are reachable by adversaries. Ultimately, a state-based safety analysis ascertains which vulnerabilities are unsafe. A related vulnerability analysis problem occurs in cybersecurity operations when associating an entity’s hardware and software assets to public vulnerability databases. Assets often reveal hardware and software through installation artifacts and network service identification, and entities store these artifacts in inventory databases. However, software and hardware vendors apply a standard Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) naming convention when publicly reporting vulnerabilities. Associating these two datasets often requires many hours to days of manual inspection. The proposed solution automates the mapping approach of human analysts using fuzzy matching techniques, natural language processing, and, ultimately, machine learning to present a small set of recommendations for mapping the two datasets. The result significantly reduces human analysis time and reduces the occurrence of false positives in vulnerability notifications. Finally, cyber threat intelligence (CTI) requires associating cyber observable artifacts, such as IP addresses, URIs, and file hashes, with cyber threat tactics, techniques, and procedures. Unfortunately, most CTI data is compartmentalized across multiple organizations and cannot be shared due to the legal and reputational risk with cyber threat being associated with the entity. The approach to solving this problem inovlves using a distributed ledger with anonymous token spending and authentication. This allows a consortium of semi-trusted entities to share the workload of curating CTI for a threat sharing community’s cooperative benefit.

Huff, Philip↗

DETECTING FIRE WITH MACHINE LEARNING-ENABLED VISUAL MONITORING FOR NUCLEAR POWER PLANT ENVIRONMENTS

Nuclear power plants are experiencing significant cost challenges to remain competitive with other energy-generation utilities. Unlike other industries, the cost of operation and maintenance activities is mostly attributed to workforce costs. To mitigate this, nuclear power plant stakeholders are increasingly interested in the development and deployment of machine learning methods to potentially automate or augment manually intensive tasks to reduce costs, especially for monitoring activities. One monitoring function that is visually demanding and that can occur frequently to meet the requirements of a fire protection program is visually monitoring an area for fire occurrence. Currently, fire watch activities consist of a worker physically stationed at a given location with the sole responsibility of observing a given area to ensure a fire is detected and mitigated promptly. This effort focused on the development and evaluation of a suitable deep convolutional neural network to classify individual video frames at a sub-second frequency for the occurrence of “fire” and “no fire” in varying industrial environments similar to nuclear power plants. It is believed that a trained neural network model could be integrated with existing facility video surveillance camera feeds to generate alerts when fire inferences occur in individual frames captured at sub-second temporal resolutions. Extensive effort was dedicated to identifying and curating suitable imagery training data representing varying environments and scene settings with and without flame features to maximize generalization in nuclear power plant environments. The data collection effort resulted in the aggregation of a large, labeled image library exceeding 12,000 images to support model training for diverse industrial environments. A deep neural network model incorporating parallel multi-scale capabilities was developed and trained to support accurate image-based detection of flame incidents of varying sizes and spectral feature properties within heterogeneous scenes. Analysis results show that the trained model can achieve high inference accuracy despite heterogeneous scene environments and components. Testing accuracy exceeded 95.0 percent with very low false positive and false negative inferences.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

BinaRena: a dedicated interactive platform for human-guided exploration and binning of metagenomes

Background: Exploring metagenomic contigs and “binning” them into metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) are essential for the delineation of functional and evolutionary guilds within microbial communities. Despite the advances in automated binning algorithms, their capabilities in recovering MAGs with accuracy and biological relevance are so far limited. Researchers often find that human involvement is necessary to achieve representative binning results. This manual process however is expertise demanding and labor intensive, and it deserves to be supported by software infrastructure. Results: We present BinaRena, a comprehensive and versatile graphic interface dedicated to aiding human operators to explore metagenome assemblies via customizable visualization and to associate contigs with bins. Contigs are rendered as an interactive scatter plot based on various data types, including sequence metrics, coverage profiles, taxonomic assignments, and functional annotations. Various contig-level operations are permitted, such as selection, masking, highlighting, focusing, and searching. Binning plans can be conveniently edited, inspected, and compared visually or using metrics including silhouette coefficient and adjusted Rand index. Completeness and contamination of user-selected contigs can be calculated in real time. In demonstration of BinaRena’s usability, we show that it facilitated biological pattern discovery, hypothesis generation, and bin refinement in a complex tropical peatland metagenome. It enabled isolation of pathogenic genomes within closely related populations from the gut microbiota of diarrheal human subjects. It significantly improved overall binning quality after curating results of automated binners using a simulated marine dataset. Conclusions: BinaRena is an installation-free, dependency-free, client-end web application that operates directly in any modern web browser, facilitating ease of deployment and accessibility for researchers of all skill levels. The program is hosted at https://github.com/qiyunlab/binarena, together with documentation, tutorials, example data, and a live demo. It effectively supports human researchers in intuitive interpretation and fine tuning of metagenomic data.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Chemical classification program synthesis using generative artificial intelligence

Accurately classifying chemical structures is essential for cheminformatics and bioinformatics, including tasks such as identifying bioactive compounds of interest, screening molecules for toxicity to humans, finding non-organic compounds with desirable material properties, or organizing large chemical libraries for drug discovery or environmental monitoring. However, manual classification is labor-intensive and difficult to scale to large chemical databases. Existing automated approaches either rely on manually constructed classification rules, or are deep learning methods that lack explainability. This work presents an approach that uses generative artificial intelligence to automatically write chemical classifier programs for classes in the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) database. These programs can be used for efficient deterministic run-time classification of SMILES structures, with natural language explanations. The programs themselves constitute an explainable computable ontological model of chemical class nomenclature, which we call the ChEBI Chemical Class Program Ontology (C3PO). We validated our approach against the ChEBI database, and compared our results against deep learning models and a naive SMARTS pattern based classifier. C3PO outperforms the naive classifier, but does not reach the performance of state of the art deep learning methods. However, C3PO has a number of strengths that complement deep learning methods, including explainability and reduced data dependence. C3PO can be used alongside deep learning classifiers to provide an explanation of the classification, where both methods agree. The programs can be used as part of the ontology development process, and iteratively refined by expert human curators.

Artificial Intelligence↗

The DSA Toolkit Shines Light Into Dark and Stormy Archives

Web archive collections are created with a particular purpose in mind. A curator selects seeds, or original resources, which are then captured by an archiving system and stored as archived web pages, or mementos. The systems that build web archive collections are often configured to revisit the same original resource multiple times. This is incredibly useful for understanding an unfolding news story or the evolution of an organization. Unfortunately, over time, some of these original resources can go off-topic and no longer suit the purpose for which the collection was originally created. They can go off-topic due to web site redesigns, changes in domain ownership, financial issues, hacking, technical problems, or because their content has moved on from the original topic. Even though they are off-topic, the archiving system will still capture them, thus it becomes imperative to anyone performing research on these collections to identify these off-topic mementos. Hence, we present the Off-Topic Memento Toolkit, which allows users to detect off-topic mementos within web archive collections. The mementos identified by this toolkit can then be separately removed from a collection or merely excluded from downstream analysis. The following similarity measures are available: byte count, word count, cosine similarity, Jaccard distance, Sørensen-Dice distance, Simhash using raw text content, Simhash using term frequency, and Latent Semantic Indexing via the gensim library. We document the implementation of each of these similarity measures. We possess a gold standard dataset generated by manual analysis, which contains both off-topic and on-topic mementos. Using this gold standard dataset, we establish a default threshold corresponding to the best F1 score for each measure. We also provide an overview of potential future directions that the toolkit may take.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Using X-Ray Computed Tomography to Catalog Rock Fragments in Apollo Drive Tube 73002

Overview: The Apollo missions collected 382 kg of rock, regolith, and core samples from six locations on the nearside of the Moon. Approximately 84% by mass of the Apollo collection remains in pristine condition within the curation facility at Johnson Space Center (i.e., never allocated, continuously stored in dry-N2 purged cabinets, exposure history restricted to Teflon, stainless steel, and Al-metal). Although most Apollo samples have been well characterized, there are several types of samples that have remained wholly or largely unstudied since their return, and/or that have been cu-rated under special conditions, e.g., frozen samples, samples stored in He-purged environment, and previously unopened drive tubes. NASA solicited proposals for the Apollo Next Generation Sample Analysis Pro-gram (ANGSA), and 9 teams were selected to study a subset of the unopened and frozen samples [1]. The first sample opened as part of the ANGSA pro-gram was drive tube 73002. This was originally a ~30 cm long, 4 cm diameter drive tube collected on a land-slide deposit near Lara Crater at the Apollo 17 landing site. It was part of a ~60 cm long double drive tube collected, and the bottom half of the tube (73001) was sealed under vacuum on the Moon [2]. Prior to opening sample 73002, the sample was imaged with a high resolution X-ray Computed Tomography (XCT) scan of the entire tube [3], which provided invaluable information during the dissection process [4]. In addition to the pre-dissection XCT scans, individual >4 mm particles were separated from the 73002 regolith during processing and scanned at high resolution by XCT. Here we pre-sent the initial lithologic classification of 134 individual >4 mm rock fragments separated from the 73002 core during the dissection process. Methodology: Drive tube 73002 was manually dissected in 0.5 cm depth intervals in three passes (Fig. 1) [4,5]. Each interval from pass 1 and 2 was sieved to <1 mm and >1 mm size fractions, and >1 mm particles were further manually subdivided into 1-2, 2-4, 4-10, and >10 mm size fractions. Pass 3 was not sieved, but >10 mm clasts were separated manually. Each 4-10 mm and >10 mm fragment was individually weighed, triply bagged in Teflon, and scanned by XCT. There are 60 rock fragments in Pass 1, 64 rock fragments in Pass 2 (from the 4-10 mm and >10 mm size fractions), and 8 rock fragments from Pass 3 (>10 mm size fraction). Each individually bagged rock fragment was scanned using the 180 kV nano-focus transmission source on the Nikon XTH 320 XCT system at NASA Johnson Space Center [6]. Scanning conditions varied considerably for individual particles, in large part be-cause of the large variation in size (0.008-19.623 g). All scans fell within the following range of scan conditions: 2.8-20.6 um voxel size; 90-155 kV voltage; 18-39 uA current; 1891-3141 projections; and 902-2000 slices. Results and Discussion: The 132 rock fragments from sample 73002 fall into the following general cat-gories: agglutinates (n = 6); basalts (13); impact melts (5); impact melt breccias (IMB; 42); regolith breccias (62); and soil breccias (4); see Figure 2 for representative examples of each lithology. Within most of these broad lithologic groups are recognizable subgroups. For example, a significant portion of regolith breccia fragments contain some agglutinate-like glass (n = 9) or are dilithologic (7) because they contain a single large clast (~50% or more by volume). Subgroups can be based on similarities to previously identified lunar lithologies, such as high-Ti basalts (9) and VLT basalts (4; Fig. 3), or based on commonly seen features within the fragments, such as poikilitic ilmenite IMB (10), ilmenite-lath IMB (12), or vesicular IMB (11) “groups”. Particles in the same “group” are not necessarily intended to be genetically related, but rather identify particles that are similar and that follow-up studies can classify in more detail [7]. Conclusion: Identification of lithologies based on XCT is a powerful tool, but a more absolute classification will sometimes require additional textural information from thin sections (e.g., glassy-matrix regolith vs. impact-melt vs. granulitic breccia) or quantitative mineral compositions (e.g., basalt vs. monomict breccia).

R A Zeigler↗