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Alnajjar, Anees

Publications and source records attributed to Alnajjar, Anees.

Shaping the Future of Self-Driving Autonomous Laboratories Workshop

The "Shaping the Future of Self-Driving Autonomous Laboratories" workshop, held in Denver on November 7-8, 2024, brought together leading experts from materials science and computing to address the growing need to revolutionize scientific research through AI-driven autonomous laboratories. The workshop identified critical challenges, including the integration of heterogeneous data, development of AI systems that understand fundamental physical principles, and comprehensive safety protocols. Key recommendations emerged around developing universal laboratory equipment interfaces, implementing automated metadata collection systems, and creating hybrid AI approaches that combine data-driven learning with scientific principles. The workshop emphasized maintaining human oversight while leveraging automation, transforming scientific education to prepare the next generation of researchers, and establishing a national consortium leveraging DOE facilities as anchors for broader collaboration with academia and industry. Participants stressed the urgency of addressing the growing disconnect between human decision-making timescales and modern instrumentation capabilities, highlighting the need for strategic automation while preserving essential human insight and oversight in the research process.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE

Diaspora: Resilience-Enabling Services for Real-Time Distributed Workflows

The need for real-time processing to enable automated decision making and experimental steering has driven a shift from high-performance computing workflows on a centralized system to a distributed approach that integrates remote data sources, edge devices, and diverse compute facilities. Under this paradigm, data can be processed close to the source where it is generated, thus reducing latency and bandwidth usage. System resilience is thus a key challenge, requiring distributed workflows to survive component failures and to meet stringent quality-of-service requirements, which results in the need to mitigate anomalies such as congestion and low availability of resources. To address these challenges, we propose Diaspora, a unified resilience framework that is inspired by event-driven communication patterns used in public clouds. Specifically, we propose an event fabric that extends across sites, facilities, and computations to provide timely, reliable, and accurate information about data, application, and resource status. On top of the event fabric, we build resilience-enabling services that combine QoS-aware data streaming, resilient data views, resilient compute and data resources, and anomaly detection and prediction, all of which collectively enhance workflow resilience for these scientific cases.

Rao, Nageswara

Autonomous Electrochemistry Platform with Real-Time Normality Testing of Voltammetry Measurements Using ML

Electrochemistry workflows utilize various instruments and computing systems to execute workflows consisting of electrocatalyst synthesis, testing and evaluation tasks. The heterogeneity of the software and hardware of these ecosystems makes it challenging to orchestrate a complete workflow from production to characterization by automating its tasks. We propose an autonomous electrochemistry computing platform for a multi-site ecosystem that provides the services for remote experiment steering, real-time measurement transfer, and AI/ML-driven analytics. We describe the integration of a mobile robot and synthesis workstation into the ecosystem by developing custom hub-networks and software modules to support remote operations over the ecosystem’s wireless and wired networks. We describe a workflow task for generating I-V voltammetry measurements using a potentiostat, and a machine learning framework to ensure their normality by detecting abnormal conditions such as disconnected electrodes. We study a number of machine learning methods for the underlying detection problem, including smooth, non-smooth, structural and statistical methods, and their fusers. We present experimental results to illustrate the effectiveness of this platform, and also validate the proposed ML method by deriving its rigorous generalization equations.

Alnajjar, Anees