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At least 937 records · Page 52

BioSIGHT: Interactive Visualization Modules for Science Education

Redefining science education to harness emerging integrated media technologies with innovative pedagogical goals represents a unique challenge. The Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) is the only engineering research center in the area of multimedia and creative technologies sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The research program at IMSC is focused on developing advanced technologies that address human-computer interfaces, database management, and high-speed network capabilities. The BioSIGHT project at is a demonstration technology project in the area of education that seeks to address how such emerging multimedia technologies can make an impact on science education. The scope of this project will help solidify NASA's commitment for the development of innovative educational resources that promotes science literacy for our students and the general population as well. These issues must be addressed as NASA marches toward the goal of enabling human space exploration that requires an understanding of life sciences in space. The IMSC BioSIGHT lab was established with the purpose of developing a novel methodology that will map a high school biology curriculum into a series of interactive visualization modules that can be easily incorporated into a space biology curriculum. Fundamental concepts in general biology must be mastered in order to allow a better understanding and application for space biology. Interactive visualization is a powerful component that can capture the students' imagination, facilitate their assimilation of complex ideas, and help them develop integrated views of biology. These modules will augment the role of the teacher and will establish the value of student-centered interactivity, both in an individual setting as well as in a collaborative learning environment. Students will be able to interact with the content material, explore new challenges, and perform virtual laboratory simulations. The BioSIGHT effort is truly cross-disciplinary in nature and requires expertise from many areas including Biology, Computer Science Electrical Engineering, Education, and the Cognitive Sciences. The BioSIGHT team includes a scientific illustrator, educational software designer, computer programmers as well as IMSC graduate and undergraduate students.

Wong, Wee Ling↗

BioSIGHT: Interactive Visualization Modules for Science Education

Redefining science education to harness emerging integrated media technologies with innovative pedagogical goals represents a unique challenge. The Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) is the only engineering research center in the area of multimedia and creative technologies sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The research program at IMSC is focused on developing advanced technologies that address human-computer interfaces, database management, and high- speed network capabilities. The BioSIGHT project at IMSC is a demonstration technology project in the area of education that seeks to address how such emerging multimedia technologies can make an impact on science education. The scope of this project will help solidify NASA's commitment for the development of innovative educational resources that promotes science literacy for our students and the general population as well. These issues must be addressed as NASA marches towards the goal of enabling human space exploration that requires an understanding of life sciences in space. The IMSC BioSIGHT lab was established with the purpose of developing a novel methodology that will map a high school biology curriculum into a series of interactive visualization modules that can be easily incorporated into a space biology curriculum. Fundamental concepts in general biology must be mastered in order to allow a better understanding and application for space biology. Interactive visualization is a powerful component that can capture the students' imagination, facilitate their assimilation of complex ideas, and help them develop integrated views of biology. These modules will augment the role of the teacher and will establish the value of student-centered interactivity, both in an individual setting as well as in a collaborative learning environment. Students will be able to interact with the content material, explore new challenges, and perform virtual laboratory simulations. The BioSIGHT effort is truly cross-disciplinary in nature and requires expertise from many areas including Biology, Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Education, and the Cognitive Sciences. The BioSIGHT team includes a scientific illustrator, educational software designer, computer programmers as well as IMSC graduate and undergraduate students. Our collaborators include TERC, a research and education organization with extensive k-12 math and science curricula development from Cambridge, MA.; SRI International of Menlo Park, CA.; teachers and students from local area high schools (Newbury Park High School, USC's Family of Five schools, Chadwick School, and Pasadena Polytechnic High School).

Wong, Wee Ling↗

Access NASA Satellite Global Precipitation Data Visualization on YouTube

Since the satellite era began, NASA has collected a large volume of Earth science observations for research and applications around the world. The collected and archived satellite data at 12 NASA data centers can also be used for STEM education and activities such as disaster events, climate change, etc. However, accessing satellite data can be a daunting task for non-professional users such as teachers and students because of unfamiliarity of terminology, disciplines, data formats, data structures, computing resources, processing software, programming languages, etc. Over the years, many efforts including tools, training classes, and tutorials have been developed to improve satellite data access for users, but barriers still exist for non-professionals. In this presentation, we will present our latest activity that uses a very popular online video sharing Web site, YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/), for accessing visualizations of our global precipitation datasets at the NASA Goddard Earth Sciences (GES) Data and Information Services Center (DISC). With YouTube, users can access and visualize a large volume of satellite data without the necessity to learn new software or download data. The dataset in this activity is a one-month animation for the GPM (Global Precipitation Measurement) Integrated Multi-satellite Retrievals for GPM (IMERG). IMERG provides precipitation on a near-global (60 deg. N-S) coverage at half-hourly time interval, providing more details on precipitation processes and development compared to the 3-hourly TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) Multisatellite Precipitation Analysis (TMPA, 3B42) product. When the retro-processing of IMERG during the TRMM era is finished in 2018, the entire video will contain more than 330,000 files and will last ~3.6 hours. Future plans include development of flyover videos for orbital data for an entire satellite mission or project. All videos, including the one-month animation, will be uploaded and available at the GES DISC site on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/NASAGESDISC).

precipitation↗

Water Structure and Properties at Hydrophilic and Hydrophobic Surfaces

The properties of water on both molecular and macroscopic surfaces critically influence a wide range of physical behaviors, with applications spanning from membrane science to catalysis to protein engineering. Yet, our current understanding of water interfacing molecular and material surfaces is incomplete, in part because measurement of water structure and molecular-scale properties challenges even the most advanced experimental characterization techniques and computational approaches. This review highlights progress in the ongoing development of tools working to answer fundamental questions on the principles that govern the interactions between water and surfaces. One outstanding and critical question is what universal molecular signatures capture the hydrophobicity of different surfaces in an operationally meaningful way, since traditional macroscopic hydrophobicity measures like contact angles fail to capture even basic properties of molecular or extended surfaces with any heterogeneity at the nanometer length scale. Resolving this grand challenge will require close interactions between state-of-the-art experiments, simulations, and theory, spanning research groups and using agreed-upon model systems, to synthesize an integrated knowledge of solvation water structure, dynamics, and thermodynamics.

catalysis (heterogeneous)↗

Electron deposition in water vapor, with atmospheric applications.

Examination of the consequences of electron impact on water vapor in terms of the microscopic details of excitation, dissociation, ionization, and combinations of these processes. Basic electron-impact cross-section data are assembled in many forms and are incorporated into semianalytic functions suitable for analysis with digital computers. Energy deposition in water vapor is discussed, and the energy loss function is presented, along with the 'electron volts per ion pair' and the efficiencies of energy loss in various processes. Several applications of electron and water-vapor interactions in the atmospheric sciences are considered, in particular, H2O comets, aurora and airglow, and lightning.

Olivero, J. J.↗

International disaster research

No existing telecommunications system can be expected to provide strategy and tactics appropriate to the complex, many faceted problem of disaster. Despite the exciting capabilities of space, communications, remote sensing, and the miracles of modern medicine, complete turnkey transfers to the disaster problem do not make the fit, and cannot be expected to do so. In 1980, a Presidential team assigned the mission of exploring disaster response within the U.S. Federal Government encountered an unanticipated obstacle: disaster was essentially undefined. In the absence of a scientifically based paradigm of disaster, there can be no measure of cost effectiveness, optimum design of manpower structure, or precise application of any technology. These problems spawned a 10-year, multidisciplinary study designed to define the origins, anatomy, and necessary management techniques for catastrophes. The design of the study necessarily reflects interests and expertise in disaster medicine, emergency medicine, telecommunications, computer communications, and forencsic sciences. This study is described.

Silverstein, Martin Elliot↗

Wireless Augmented Reality Prototype (WARP)

Initiated in January, 1997, under NASA's Office of Life and Microgravity Sciences and Applications, the Wireless Augmented Reality Prototype (WARP) is a means to leverage recent advances in communications, displays, imaging sensors, biosensors, voice recognition and microelectronics to develop a hands-free, tetherless system capable of real-time personal display and control of computer system resources. Using WARP, an astronaut may efficiently operate and monitor any computer-controllable activity inside or outside the vehicle or station. The WARP concept is a lightweight, unobtrusive heads-up display with a wireless wearable control unit. Connectivity to the external system is achieved through a high-rate radio link from the WARP personal unit to a base station unit installed into any system PC. The radio link has been specially engineered to operate within the high- interference, high-multipath environment of a space shuttle or space station module. Through this virtual terminal, the astronaut will be able to view and manipulate imagery, text or video, using voice commands to control the terminal operations. WARP's hands-free access to computer-based instruction texts, diagrams and checklists replaces juggling manuals and clipboards, and tetherless computer system access allows free motion throughout a cabin while monitoring and operating equipment.

Devereaux, A. S.↗

Telemedicine Program

Since the 1970s, NASA has been involved in the research and demonstration of telemedicine for its potential in the care of astronauts in flight and Earth-bound applications. A combination of NASA funding, expertise and off-the-shelf computer and networking systems made telemedicine possible for a medically underserved hospital in Texas. Through two-way audio/video relay, the program links pediatric oncology specialists at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio to South Texas Hospital in Harlingen, providing easier access and better care to children with cancer. Additionally, the hospital is receiving teleclinics on pediatric oncology nursing, family counseling and tuberculosis treatment. VTEL Corporation, Sprint, and the Healthcare Open Systems and Trials Consortium also contributed staff and hardware.

Source record↗

The Electric Propulsion Interactions Code (EPIC)

Science Applications International Corporation is currently developing the Electric Propulsion Interactions Code, EPIC, as part of a project sponsored by the Space Environments and Effects Program at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. Now in its second year of development, EPIC is an interactive computer tool that allows the construction of a 3-D spacecraft model, and the assessment of a variety of interactions between its subsystems and the plume from an electric thruster. These interactions may include erosion of surfaces due to sputtering and re-deposition of sputtered materials, surface heating, torque on the spacecraft, and changes in surface properties due to erosion and deposition. This paper describes the overall capability of EPIC and provides an outline of the physics and algorithms that comprise many of its computational modules.

Mikellides, I. G.↗

OpenSNAPI: Toward a Unified API for SmartNICs

The end of Moore’s Law and Dennard Scaling has produced a renaissance in the field of computer architecture. Unable to continue leveraging silicon-level processor improvements to further enhance performance and scalability, system architects have been forced to explore other options. In this new era of heterogeneous architectures and hardware/software codesign, a new class of devices known as “accelerators” has emerged. Independently designed for optimized execution of distinct workloads, these devices have proven critical to the continued advancement of application performance. SmartNICs, accelerator devices integrated with a network controller, have conventionally been utilized to offload low-level networking functionality. However, newer SmartNIC variants, which incorporate a system-on-chip (SoC) with traditional designs, are challenging this precedent. Leveraging significantly augmented resources, these new devices offer increased versatility and the potential to more effectively complement a given architecture’s CPU. In this talk, we introduce the motivation underlying acceleration, explore the fundamentals of SmartNICs, and discuss traditional use cases. We also detail our initial efforts to investigate the feasibility and benefits of SmartNICs as general-purpose accelerators. We present the OpenSNAPI project created to define a uniform application programming interface (API) for this emerging class of devices. Finally, we provide a brief tutorial regarding development of SmartNIC-accelerated applications on Los Alamos National Laboratory’s SmartNIC-enabled platforms.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Machine learning assisted prediction of the Young’s modulus of compositionally complex alloys

We identify compositionally complex alloys (CCAs) that offer exceptional mechanical properties for elevated temperature applications by employing machine learning (ML) in conjunction with rapid synthesis and testing of alloys for validation to accelerate alloy design. The advantages of this approach are scalability, rapidity, and reasonably accurate predictions. ML tools were implemented to predict Young’s modulus of refractory-based CCAs by employing different ML models. Our results, in conjunction with experimental validation, suggest that average valence electron concentration, the difference in atomic radius, a geometrical parameter λ and melting temperature of the alloys are the key features that determine the Young’s modulus of CCAs and refractory-based CCAs. The Gradient Boosting model provided the best predictive capabilities (mean absolute error of 6.15 GPa) among the models studied. Our approach integrates high-quality validation data from experiments, literature data for training machine-learning models, and feature selection based on physical insights. It opens a new avenue to optimize the desired materials property for different engineering applications.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Quantifying local and global mass balance errors in physics-informed neural networks

Physics-informed neural networks (PINN) have recently become attractive for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) that describe physics laws. By including PDE-based loss functions, physics laws such as mass balance are enforced softly in PINN. This paper investigates how mass balance constraints are satisfied when PINN is used to solve the resulting PDEs. We investigate PINN’s ability to solve the 1D saturated groundwater flow equations (diffusion equations) for homogeneous and heterogeneous media and evaluate the local and global mass balance errors. We compare the obtained PINN’s solution and associated mass balance errors against a two-point finite volume numerical method and the corresponding analytical solution. We also evaluate the accuracy of PINN in solving the 1D saturated groundwater flow equation with and without incorporating hydraulic heads as training data. We demonstrate that PINN’s local and global mass balance errors are significant compared to the finite volume approach. Tuning the PINN’s hyperparameters, such as the number of collocation points, training data, hidden layers, nodes, epochs, and learning rate, did not improve the solution accuracy or the mass balance errors compared to the finite volume solution. Mass balance errors could considerably challenge the utility of PINN in applications where ensuring compliance with physical and mathematical properties is crucial.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Online monitoring using cloud-based applications.

Online monitoring using cloud-based applications presentation. Enabling online monitoring using cloud services will require additional sensors, systems and choices.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Evaluating cosmological biases using photometric redshifts for Type Ia Supernova cosmology with the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program

Cosmological analyses with Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) have traditionally been reliant on spectroscopy for both classifying the type of supernova and obtaining reliable redshifts to measure the distance–redshift relation. While obtaining a host-galaxy spectroscopic redshift for most SNe is feasible for small-area transient surveys, it will be too resource intensive for upcoming large-area surveys such as the Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, which will observe on the order of millions of SNe. Here, we use data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) to address this problem with photometric redshifts (photo-z) inferred directly from the SN light curve in combination with Gaussian and full p(z) priors from host-galaxy photo-z estimates. Using the DES 5-yr photometrically classified SN sample, we consider several photo-z algorithms as host-galaxy photo-z priors, including the Self-Organizing Map redshifts (SOMPZ), Bayesian Photometric Redshifts (BPZ), and Directional-Neighbourhood Fitting (DNF) redshift estimates employed in the DES 3 × 2 point analyses. With detailed catalogue-level simulations of the DES 5-yr sample, we find that the simulated w can be recovered within ±0.02 when using SN+SOMPZ or DNF prior photo-z, smaller than the average statistical uncertainty for these samples of 0.03. With data, we obtain biases in w consistent with simulations within ~1σ for three of the five photo-z variants. We further evaluate how photo-z systematics interplay with photometric classification and find classification introduces a subdominant systematic component. This work lays the foundation for next-generation fully photometric SNe Ia cosmological analyses.

(cosmology:) dark energy↗

It is not σ 8 : constraining the non-linear matter power spectrum with the Dark Energy Survey Year-5 supernova sample

The weak gravitational lensing magnification of Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) is sensitive to the matter power spectrum on scales $k\gt 1 h$ Mpc$^{-1}$, making it unwise to interpret SNe Ia lensing in terms of power on linear scales. We compute the probability density function of SNe Ia magnification as a function of standard cosmological parameters, plus an empirical parameter $A_{\rm mod}$ which describes the suppression or enhancement of matter power on non-linear scales compared to a cold dark matter only model. While baryons are expected to enhance power on the scales relevant to SN Ia lensing, other physics such as neutrino masses or non-standard dark matter may suppress power. Using the Dark Energy Survey Year-5 sample, we find $A_{\rm mod} = 0.77^{+0.69}_{-0.40}$ (68 per cent credible interval around the median). Although the median is consistent with unity there are hints of power suppression, with $A_{\rm mod} \lt 1.09$ at 68 per cent credibility.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗