Poczos, Barnabas | Search NASA

DOE OSTI2023

Integrated Design of Ultradurable, Low CO 2 Alternative Binder Systems via Machine Learning

This ARPA-E project developed a machine learning tool to use in formulation design of cementitious binders for concrete having 50% less embodied CO 2 and possessing twice the durability compared to concrete based on ordinary portland cement (OPC) binders. The technical focus was on limestone/calcined clay cement (LC3), the leading replacement for OPC. Here, hierarchical machine learning (HML) was used to model the flowability, set time, strength, and durability of LC3 concrete. This methodology identifies latent variables derived from domain knowledge and empirical models that develop an accurate model for a response surface from small datasets. For the flowability metric, particle packing was a dominant factor, while strength and durability were both strongly determined by the fraction of metakaolin and the water:solids ratio. Under constraints of water:binder ratio, material performance metrics, embodied CO 2 , and cost per tonne of OPC, multi-objective optimization was used to design binders parameterized by the mineral composition replacing OPC, particle size distributions, and water:solids ratio. The trained algorithm was able to predict multiple mixes met these performance criteria, and experimental testing validated the predictions. The model demonstrated here is relevant for North America, where pure kaolin deposits are found broadly. The approach is being taken forward into commercial application by Ansatz AI, a materials informatics company founded by PI Washburn and co-PI Poczos. Through collaborations with the cement and concrete industry, and funding from SBIR programs, a commercial software will be developed in future research.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

DOE OSTI2019

Exploring End-to-end Deep Learning Applications for Event Classification at CMS

An essential part of new physics searches at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN involves event classification, or distinguishing potential signal events from those coming from background processes. Current machine learning techniques accomplish this using traditional hand-engineered features like particle 4-momenta, motivated by our understanding of particle decay phenomenology. While such techniques have proven useful for simple decays, they are highly dependent on our ability to model all aspects of the phenomenology and detector response. Meanwhile, powerful deep learning algorithms are capable of not only training on high-level features, but of performing feature extraction. In computer vision, convolutional neural networks have become the state-of-the-art for many applications. Motivated by their success, we apply deep learning algorithms to low-level detector data from the 2012 CMS Simulated Open Data to directly learn useful features, in what we call, end-to-end event classification. We demonstrate the power of this approach in the context of a physics search and offer solutions to some of the inherent challenges, such as image construction, image sparsity, combining multiple sub-detectors, and de-correlating the classifier from the search observable, among others.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗