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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 217 records · Page 12

Extending the Remote Control Capabilities in the CMS Detector Control System with Remote Procedure Call Services

The CMS Detector Control System (DCS) is implemented as a large distributed and redundant system, with applications interacting and sharing data in multiple ways. The CMS XML-RPC is a software toolkit implementing the standard Remote Procedure Call (RPC) protocol, using the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) and a custom lightweight variant using the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to model, encode and expose resources through the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The CMS XML-RPC toolkit complies with the standard specification of the XML-RPC protocol that allows system developers to build collaborative software architectures with self-contained and reusable logic, and with encapsulation of well-defined processes. The implementation of this protocol introduces not only a powerful communication method to operate and exchange data with web-based applications, but also a new programming paradigm to design service-oriented software architectures within the CMS DCS domain. This paper presents details of the CMS XML-RPC implementation in WinCC Open Architecture (OA) Control Language using an object-oriented approach.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

From Rules to Reasoning: A Survey of Large Language Model-Based Approaches to Scientific Hypothesis and Idea Generation

Scientific hypothesis generation represents a fundamental challenge in contemporary research due to exponentially expanding literature volumes and increasing disciplinary specialization. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative tools for automated scientific discovery, moving beyond traditional rule-based and literature-mining approaches. Four paradigmatic approaches define current LLM-driven hypothesis generation: direct prompting and fine-tuning methods, knowledge-enhanced frameworks integrating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), multi-agent collaborative systems simulating research teams, and reasoning-focused approaches implementing cognitive architectures. Domain-specific applications demonstrate statistical equivalence to human expert performance in social psychology, experimental validation in biomedical research, and near-expert quality in astronomy. Evaluation methodologies encompass human expert assessment, LLM-as-judge frameworks, and comprehensive benchmarking systems. Technical challenges include hallucination management, knowledge integration limitations, and balancing novelty with feasibility. Future directions emphasize hybrid neural-symbolic architectures and sophisticated human-AI collaboration models for responsible scientific discovery acceleration.

AI-driven discovery↗

Generating target system specifications from a domain model using CLIPS

The quest for reuse in software engineering is still being pursued and researchers are actively investigating the domain modeling approach to software construction. There are several domain modeling efforts reported in the literature and they all agree that the components that are generated from domain modeling are more conducive to reuse. Once a domain model is created, several target systems can be generated by tailoring the domain model or by evolving the domain model and then tailoring it according to the specified requirements. This paper presents the Evolutionary Domain Life Cycle (EDLC) paradigm in which a domain model is created using multiple views, namely, aggregation hierarchy, generalization/specialization hierarchies, object communication diagrams and state transition diagrams. The architecture of the Knowledge Based Requirements Elicitation Tool (KBRET) which is used to generate target system specifications is also presented. The preliminary version of KBRET is implemented in the C Language Integrated Production System (CLIPS).

Sugumaran, Vijayan↗

Formalizing New Navigation Requirements for NASA's Space Shuttle

We describe a recent NASA-sponsored pilot project intended to gauge the effectiveness of using formal methods in Space Shuttle software requirements analysis. Several Change Requests (CRs) were selected as promising targets to demonstrate the utility of formal methods in this demanding application domain. A CR to add new navigation capabilities to the Shuttle, based on Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, is the focus of this industrial usage report. Portions of the GPS CR were modeled using the language of SRI's Prototype Verification System (PVS). During a limited analysis conducted on the formal specifications, numerous requirements issues were discovered. We present a summary of these encouraging results and conclusions we have drawn from the pilot project.

DiVito, Ben L.↗

Automated Generation of Integrated Digital and Spiking Neuromorphic Machine Learning Accelerators

The growing numbers of application areas for artificial intelligence (AI) methods have led to an explosion of domain-specific accelerators that could support every new machine learning (ML) algorithm advancement, clearly highlighting the need for a capability to quickly and automatically transition from algorithm definition to hardware implementation and explore design space along a variety of SWaP (size, weight and Power). The software defined architectures (SODA) synthesizer implements a compiler-based modular infrastructure for the end-to-end generation of machine learning accelerators from high-level frameworks to hardware description language. At the same time, neuromorphic computing, by mimicking how the brain operates, promises to perform artificial intelligence tasks at efficiencies orders of magnitude higher than the current conventional tensor-processing based accelerators, as demonstrated by a variety of specialized designs leveraging Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs). Nevertheless, the mapping of an artificial neural network (ANN) to solutions supporting SNNs is still a non-trivial and very device-specific task, and completely lack the possibility to design hybrid systems that integrate conventional and spiking neural models. In this paper we discuss the support for such an integrated generation leveraging the SODA Synthesizer framework and its modular structure. In particular, we present a new MLIR dialect (part of the SODA frontend) that allows expressing spiking neural network features (e.g., available resources, spiking sequences, analog signal reading, etc.) and illustrate how it enables mapping to Spiking Neurons and deployment to the related specialized hardware (which, in the digital domain, could be generated through the other existing layers of the SODA Synthesizer). We then discuss the opportunities for even deeper integration afforded by the hardware compilation infrastructure, providing a path towards the generation of complex heterogeneous artificial intelligence systems.

Curzel, Serena↗

General purpose architecture for intelligent computer-aided training

An intelligent computer-aided training system having a general modular architecture is provided for use in a wide variety of training tasks and environments. It is comprised of a user interface which permits the trainee to access the same information available in the task environment and serves as a means for the trainee to assert actions to the system; a domain expert which is sufficiently intelligent to use the same information available to the trainee and carry out the task assigned to the trainee; a training session manager for examining the assertions made by the domain expert and by the trainee for evaluating such trainee assertions and providing guidance to the trainee which are appropriate to his acquired skill level; a trainee model which contains a history of the trainee interactions with the system together with summary evaluative data; an intelligent training scenario generator for designing increasingly complex training exercises based on the current skill level contained in the trainee model and on any weaknesses or deficiencies that the trainee has exhibited in previous interactions; and a blackboard that provides a common fact base for communication between the other components of the system. Preferably, the domain expert contains a list of 'mal-rules' which typifies errors that are usually made by novice trainees. Also preferably, the training session manager comprises an intelligent error detection means and an intelligent error handling means. The present invention utilizes a rule-based language having a control structure whereby a specific message passing protocol is utilized with respect to tasks which are procedural or step-by-step in structure. The rules can be activated by the trainee in any order to reach the solution by any valid or correct path.

Loftin, R. Bowen↗

Derivation of Effective Properties Based on Porous Scale Simulations Using Filtering Techniques

This study presents a method for derivation of effective properties at the interface and in-depth of porous materials. The method defines a Representative Elementary Volume (REV) and applies filtering techniques to computer effective properties such as porosity and flow quantities, such as velocity and pressure. The script, developed to process the data was tested on the VTK type files that contain the mesh information and the flow solution. The method allows to choose between two types of filters, such as cellular and top-hat and define the size of the REV and number of samples along the domain. Extraction of the REV from the domain is performed to exact boundaries requested for the user. This is done using a triangulation technique and cutting through the cells to comply to the requested boundaries of the volume. The method can be applied to both structured and unstructured meshes. Filtering the material porosity and flow quantities involves integration of the numerical data. The algorithm provides three integration methods, such as Riemann sum, Monte Carlo and Quadrature rule to perform the integration. The Monte-Carlo technique permits the use of either uniform or linearly spaced distribution of points. The Quadrature rule is currently applicable to tetrahedral element types. The Monte Carlo and Quadrature rule methods require interpolation of the flow quantities at the sample points. For interpolation, two methods were tested and are readily available, Gaussian interpolation and re-sampling. It has been shown that re-sampling method has better consistency and acceptable accuracy in interpolation of the data. The algorithm was written in Python language and uses a number of modules. The major module besides numpy is PyVista. It is used to process the computational domain, clip the REV and interpolate the data. Quadrature rule integration was performed using a quadpy module. ParaView software was used externally to convert the flow solution to the VTK (or more specifically VTU) format. Integration of ParaView in the same environment with PyVista encountered problems and could not be implemented in this work. The developed algorithm is expected to be applicable to unstructured meshes and more complex porous structures as soon as the data can be passed in VTK type format. With the report is provided Python script for filtering the solution and a Matlab script for simple generation and processing of 2-D and 3-D porous channel geometries. The two scripts don't communicate.

Alexsander Zibitsker↗

Text Mining for Process–Structure–Properties Relationships in Metals

With the advent of large language models (LLMs), the vast unstructured text within millions of academic papers is increasingly accessible for materials discovery—although significant challenges remain. While LLMs offer promising few- and zero-shot learning capabilities, particularly valuable in the materials domain where expert annotations are scarce, general-purpose LLMs often fail to address key materials-specific queries without further adaptation. To bridge this gap, fine-tuning LLMs on human-labeled data is essential for effective structured knowledge extraction (Liu in The Importance of Human-Labeled Data in the Era of LLMs, 2023). Here, in this study, we introduce a novel annotation schema designed to extract generic process–structure–properties relationships from scientific literature. We demonstrate the utility of this approach using a dataset of 128 abstracts, with annotations drawn from two distinct domains: high-temperature materials (Domain I) and uncertainty quantification in simulating materials microstructure (Domain II). Initially, we developed a conditional random field (CRF) model based on MatBERT—a domain-specific BERT variant—and evaluated its performance on Domain I. Subsequently, we compared this model with a fine-tuned LLM (GPT-4o from OpenAI) under identical conditions. Our results indicate that fine-tuning LLMs can significantly improve entity extraction performance over the BERT-CRF baseline on Domain I. However, when additional examples from Domain II were incorporated, the performance of the BERT-CRF model became comparable to that of the GPT-4o model. These findings underscore the potential of our schema for structured knowledge extraction and highlight the complementary strengths of both modeling approaches.

Materials science↗

PRIME: An evaluation framework for protein representation inference and generalization in viral mutation space

Background Protein language models (PLMs) have revolutionized protein fitness prediction, yet their application to rapidly evolving viral pathogens is often confounded by extreme sequence homology. This homology leads to “data leakage” in standard random validation splits, yielding inflated performance metrics that fail to translate into real-world biosurveillance utility. Results We present Protein Representation Inference for Mutation Evaluation (PRIME), a framework that integrates domain-specific fine-tuning with a rigorous position-stratified validation protocol to evaluate viral threats. Using a dataset of 347,432 SARS-CoV-2 receptor binding domain (RBD) sequences, we demonstrate that while random training data split yields deceptive R 2 values (> 0.90), they fail to generalize to novel mutational sites. By benchmarking models up to 650 M parameters, we show that domain-specific fine-tuning of the ESM-C 600 M model with correctly stratified data provides an initial demonstration of predictive signal for binding affinity and expression at unseen mutational sites of binding affinity and expression on unseen sites (R 2 ~0.23), a significant advancement over base foundation models which exhibit no predictive power (R 2 <0). PRIME’s embedding-based clustering identified 3.03% of bat coronavirus sequences as candidates for further experimental prioritization based on their functional similarity to human-infective strains in embedding space, offering a perspective complementary to traditional phylogenetic methods. Conclusion PRIME establishes a new benchmark for the application of PLMs in pathogen surveillance. Our findings demonstrate that state-of-the-art models and fine-tuning, when paired with stratified validation, provide biologically meaningful insights into pathogen evolution and zoonotic risk.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

A learning apprentice for software parts composition

An overview of the knowledge acquisition component of the Bauhaus, a prototype computer aided software engineering (CASE) workstation for the development of domain-specific automatic programming systems (D-SAPS) is given. D-SAPS use domain knowledge in the refinement of a description of an application program into a compilable implementation. The approach to the construction of D-SAPS was to automate the process of refining a description of a program, expressed in an object-oriented domain language, into a configuration of software parts that implement the behavior of the domain objects.

Allen, Bradley P.↗

Foundation Models of Scientific Knowledge for Chemistry: Opportunities, Challenges and Lessons Learned

Foundation models pre-trained on large corpora demonstrate significant gains across many natural language processing tasks and domains e.g., law, healthcare, education, etc. However, only limited efforts have investigated the opportunities and limitations of applying these powerful models to science and security applications. In this work we develop foundation models of scientific knowledge for chemistry to augment scientists with the advanced ability to perceive and reason at scale previously unimagined. Specifically, we build large-scale (1.47B parameter) general-purpose models for chemistry that can be effectively used to perform a wide range of in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. Evaluating these models in a zero-shot setting, we analyze the effect of model and data scaling, knowledge depth, and temporality on model performance in context of model training efficiency. Our novel findings demonstrate that (1) model size significantly contributes to the task performance when evaluated in a zero-shot setting; (2) data quality (aka diversity) affects model performance more than data quantity; (3) similarly, unlike previous work (Luu et al., 2021) temporal order of the documents in the corpus boosts model performance only for specific tasks, e.g., SciQ; and (4) models pre-trained from scratch perform better on in-domain tasks than those tuned from general-purpose models like Open AI’s GPT-2.

Foundation Models, Chemistry↗

S4PST: Sustainability for Programming Systems and Tools: May Workshop Report

The US Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has fostered and strengthened the use of modern software engineering practices for developing applications and libraries, and this effort has resulted in the coordinated and interoperable E4S1 and xSDK2 ecosystems. Although this approach is cost-effective, it relies on robust programming systems and tools (PST) as the underlying foundation for our HPC software. At present, our primary PST stack consists of traditional high-performance computing (HPC) languages, namely Fortran, C, C++, and the popular Python language for data analysis and AI workflows. These languages support various programming frameworks and run-time abstractions that enable parallelism and concurrency across multiple node architectures and thousands of nodes through a variety of interconnect systems. However, to accommodate users’ diverse needs, certain aspects of the HPC ecosystem are delegated to vendor-specific or third-party implementations that extend beyond a particular scientific domain. This broader scope results in a multitude of specifications and variations, which leads to a complex orchestration of many-ecosystems. Unfortunately, this complexity in the ecosystem imposes additional overhead costs on consumers during the latter stages of the development cycle. In addition to the software ecosystem challenge, the upcoming conclusion of the ECP by December 2023 has raised significant concerns within the HPC programming systems community, from both the economic and social perspectives. The ECP has implemented a management structure for software development and funding decisions across all ECP participants by following a conventional hierarchical and centralized approach. However, this structure has prompted certain considerations within the community, particularly in anticipation of the Software Sustainability initiative by the DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research Program (ASCR). For the success of this new initiative, it is of utmost importance to secure consistent funding and foster close engagement with researchers and core developers of existing programming-system products. This collaboration is vital to maintaining the critical capabilities of the current software during the transition phase while proactively adapting to future technology and workforce trends. The community recognizes the significance of adapting to emerging trends and is aware of the inherent fragility of the HPC software ecosystem, particularly in relation to programming systems that cater to all users. The ability to adapt and evolve is essential to staying relevant and effectively addressing these technical, economic, and social challenges. The S4PST team, which represents one of the six ASCR Software Sustainability seedling projects, is dedicated to tackling these challenges through community-based approaches that go beyond the scope of the DOE. This involves collaboration between national laboratories with academia, non-DOE institutions, hardware and system vendors, and international partners. By fostering these partnerships, we aim to create a robust and sustainable HPC software ecosystem that can effectively meet the needs of the community. This new community effort, driven by the eight DOE labs, will take on the responsibility of guiding funding decisions for programming-systems development and maintenance with transparency and consistency across all decisions. Additionally, the team will offer common technical services to the programming systems community, irrespective of their funding situations, and facilitate community-wide incubation to proactively nurture the software ecosystem. By actively engaging with stakeholders and employing a collaborative approach, we can collectively shape the future of programming systems and ensure a robust and thriving HPC software landscape. On May 11–12, 2023, the S4PST team conducted its inaugural kick-off workshop at the Innovative Computing Laboratory (ICL) in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, hosted by Hartwig Anzt. The workshop encompassed various sessions dedicated to presentations and discussions, with the aim of comprehending the team members’ perspectives on the vision of software sustainability. Additionally, the workshop aimed to identify the technical, economic, and social requirements for sustaining the programming-systems community in the field of HPC. This report provides a summary of the S4PST effort by highlighting five major thrust areas discussed during the workshop: (i) community, (ii) technical support, (iii) training and diversity, (iv) verification, validation and correctness, and (v) emerging technologies. It also encompasses an overview of the presentations and discussions held throughout the event, our views and potential synergies with other seedling efforts, along with the outcomes and key takeaways from our initial discussions.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

A Comparison of PETSC Library and HPF Implementations of an Archetypal PDE Computation

Two paradigms for distributed-memory parallel computation that free the application programmer from the details of message passing are compared for an archetypal structured scientific computation a nonlinear, structured-grid partial differential equation boundary value problem using the same algorithm on the same hardware. Both paradigms, parallel libraries represented by Argonne's PETSC, and parallel languages represented by the Portland Group's HPF, are found to be easy to use for this problem class, and both are reasonably effective in exploiting concurrency after a short learning curve. The level of involvement required by the application programmer under either paradigm includes specification of the data partitioning (corresponding to a geometrically simple decomposition of the domain of the PDE). Programming in SPAM style for the PETSC library requires writing the routines that discretize the PDE and its Jacobian, managing subdomain-to-processor mappings (affine global- to-local index mappings), and interfacing to library solver routines. Programming for HPF requires a complete sequential implementation of the same algorithm, introducing concurrency through subdomain blocking (an effort similar to the index mapping), and modest experimentation with rewriting loops to elucidate to the compiler the latent concurrency. Correctness and scalability are cross-validated on up to 32 nodes of an IBM SP2.

Hayder, M. Ehtesham↗

Plug and Play Integration through Space Object Standardization

Plug and play is an industry standard promoted by Intel and Microsoft, and others that allows users to add and remove various input and output devices without making specific customizations to their systems. The idea behind concept is that using standard products eases integration of components and promotes capabilities of conforming products. The concept works because vendors comply with a standard specification. This paper reports the development of a reference architecture for the mission control domain, which is leveraging off this revolutionary concept. Standards are being developed at the application layer, which enable "plug and play" of mission software products. A Mission Control, reference architecture has been defined. For each sub-domain, the interfaces are modeled in Interface Definition Language (IDL). A subset of the IDL has been developed within both commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and government (GOTS) products. Selected vendors have agreed to modify their products to be compatible with the defined IDL. The plug and play integration of these different products has been validated in a demonstration testbed.

Boyce, Leslye↗

Transcribing Air Traffic Control System Command Center Planning Telecons Using Cloud-Based Automatic Speech Recognition

This paper addresses the challenge of using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology to transcribe regular teleconferences that happen between FAA Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) planners, stakeholders and air users. These planning teleconferences (aka telecons or planning webinars) are an integral part of managing air traffic in the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS). In particular, the meetings facilitate the creation and modification of various traffic management initiatives (TMIs), that are used to regulate the flow of air traffic. This is typically a human intensive process, requiring specialists to listen to the entire meeting audio (10-20 minutes duration) and inferring the state of the NAS (e.g., weather phenomenon) that was discussed. It would be advantageous to have digital transcripts of the audio and have useful information (e.g., related to TMIs) automatically extracted from the transcripts. In this regard, we are exploring the adoption of state-of-the-art speech to text and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools that will achieve our objective of digitizing the webinar audio. Unfortunately, the highly technical phraseology present in the audio and limited data availability for model building make ASR difficult. To overcome this challenge, we have taken the critical first step in creating a human transcription dataset from ~20 hours of speech in the ATCSCC audio with the help of subject matter experts. A novelty of our work is the creation of a ground truth transcription dataset for ATCSCC teleconference webinars, which is particularly important for Aviation domain-specific NLP tasks. Using Microsoft Speech Studio, a cloud-based ASR platform, we have fine-tuned the English pre-trained ASR models (available in speech studio) and achieved an average word error rate (WER) of 6.81%. The baseline ASR also provides a digital version of each planning webinar, making it accessible and text-searchable for future references. Additionally, the transcriptions can serve as a bridge between raw audio data and a range of text-based NLP tasks, such as named entity recognition (NER) and intent classification, potentially enhancing the digital footprint of the webinars and other connected data sources. Our work has several potential applications. Firstly, the transcriptions can be analyzed to understand the complex decision process of creating, implementing and modifying TMIs and may also contribute to TMI prediction services. Secondly, our dataset and model can be used to develop more accurate ASR systems for aviation-specific language, which can bring about digital communication in the aviation industry (and aid current “voice only” communications, which are inherently error-prone). Lastly, the transcriptions themselves can be used as a valuable resource for training other NLP models.

Stephen S. B. Clarke↗

A meta-analysis of semantic classification of citations

The aim of this literature review is to examine the current state of the art in the area of citation classification. In particular, we investigate the approaches for characterizing citations based on their semantic type. We conduct this literature review as a meta-analysis covering 60 scholarly articles in this domain. Although we included some of the manual pioneering works in this review, more emphasis is placed on the later automated methods, which use Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) for analyzing the fine-grained linguistic features in the surrounding text of citations. The sections are organized based on the steps involved in the pipeline for citation classification. Specifically, we explore the existing classification schemes, data sets, pre-processing methods, extraction of contextual and non-contextual features, and the different types of classifiers and evaluation approaches. The review highlights the importance of identifying the citation types for research evaluation, the challenges faced by the researchers in the process, and the existing research gaps in this field.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗

Logic programming and metadata specifications

Artificial intelligence (AI) ideas and techniques are critical to the development of intelligent information systems that will be used to collect, manipulate, and retrieve the vast amounts of space data produced by 'Missions to Planet Earth.' Natural language processing, inference, and expert systems are at the core of this space application of AI. This paper presents logic programming as an AI tool that can support inference (the ability to draw conclusions from a set of complicated and interrelated facts). It reports on the use of logic programming in the study of metadata specifications for a small problem domain of airborne sensors, and the dataset characteristics and pointers that are needed for data access.

Lopez, Antonio M., Jr.↗

Design for Verification: Using Design Patterns to Build Reliable Systems

Components so far have been mainly used in commercial software development to reduce time to market. While some effort has been spent on formal aspects of components, most of this was done in the context of programming language or operating system framework integration. As a consequence, increased reliability of composed systems is mainly regarded as a side effect of a more rigid testing of pre-fabricated components. In contrast to this, Design for Verification (D4V) puts the focus on component specific property guarantees, which are used to design systems with high reliability requirements. D4V components are domain specific design pattern instances with well-defined property guarantees and usage rules, which are suitable for automatic verification. The guaranteed properties are explicitly used to select components according to key system requirements. The D4V hypothesis is that the same general architecture and design principles leading to good modularity, extensibility and complexity/functionality ratio can be adapted to overcome some of the limitations of conventional reliability assurance measures, such as too large a state space or too many execution paths.

Mehlitz, Peter C.↗