Materials
The Download: AI privacy risks, and cleaning up shipping
One of the biggest stories in tech this year has been the rise of large language models (LLMs). These are AI models that produce text a human might have written--sometimes so convincingly they have tricked people into thinking they are sentient. These models' power comes from troves of publicly available human-created text that has been hoovered from the internet. If you've posted anything even remotely personal in English on the internet, chances are your data might be part of some of the world's most popular LLMs. My colleague Melissa Heikkilä, our AI reporter, recently started to wonder what data these models might have on her--and how it could be misused. A bruising experience a decade ago left her paranoid about sharing personal details online, so she put OpenAI's GPT-3 to the test to see what it "knows" about her.
Computational design of antimicrobial active surfaces via automated Bayesian optimization
Biofilms pose significant problems for engineers in diverse fields, such as marine science, bioenergy, and biomedicine, where effective biofilm control is a long-term goal. The adhesion and surface mechanics of biofilms play crucial roles in generating and removing biofilm. Designing customized nano-surfaces with different surface topologies can alter the adhesive properties to remove biofilms more easily and greatly improve long-term biofilm control. To rapidly design such topologies, we employ individual-based modeling and Bayesian optimization to automate the design process and generate different active surfaces for effective biofilm removal. Our framework successfully generated ideal nano-surfaces for biofilm removal through applied shear and vibration. Densely distributed short pillar topography is the optimal geometry to prevent biofilm formation. Under fluidic shearing, the optimal topography is to sparsely distribute tall, slim, pillar-like structures. When subjected to either vertical or lateral vibrations, thick trapezoidal cones are found to be optimal. Optimizing the vibrational loading indicates a small vibration magnitude with relatively low frequencies is more efficient in removing biofilm. Our results provide insights into various engineering fields that require surface-mediated biofilm control. Our framework can also be applied to more general materials design and optimization.
MultiCoNER: A Large-scale Multilingual dataset for Complex Named Entity Recognition
Malmasi, Shervin, Fang, Anjie, Fetahu, Besnik, Kar, Sudipta, Rokhlenko, Oleg
We present MultiCoNER, a large multilingual dataset for Named Entity Recognition that covers 3 domains (Wiki sentences, questions, and search queries) across 11 languages, as well as multilingual and code-mixing subsets. This dataset is designed to represent contemporary challenges in NER, including low-context scenarios (short and uncased text), syntactically complex entities like movie titles, and long-tail entity distributions. The 26M token dataset is compiled from public resources using techniques such as heuristic-based sentence sampling, template extraction and slotting, and machine translation. We applied two NER models on our dataset: a baseline XLM-RoBERTa model, and a state-of-the-art GEMNET model that leverages gazetteers. The baseline achieves moderate performance (macro-F1=54%), highlighting the difficulty of our data. GEMNET, which uses gazetteers, improvement significantly (average improvement of macro-F1=+30%). MultiCoNER poses challenges even for large pre-trained language models, and we believe that it can help further research in building robust NER systems. MultiCoNER is publicly available at https://registry.opendata.aws/multiconer/ and we hope that this resource will help advance research in various aspects of NER.
Faithful Reasoning Using Large Language Models
Creswell, Antonia, Shanahan, Murray
Although contemporary large language models (LMs) demonstrate impressive question-answering capabilities, their answers are typically the product of a single call to the model. This entails an unwelcome degree of opacity and compromises performance, especially on problems that are inherently multi-step. To address these limitations, we show how LMs can be made to perform faithful multi-step reasoning via a process whose causal structure mirrors the underlying logical structure of the problem. Our approach works by chaining together reasoning steps, where each step results from calls to two fine-tuned LMs, one for selection and one for inference, to produce a valid reasoning trace. Our method carries out a beam search through the space of reasoning traces to improve reasoning quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on multi-step logical deduction and scientific question-answering, showing that it outperforms baselines on final answer accuracy, and generates humanly interpretable reasoning traces whose validity can be checked by the user.
"Prompt-Gamma Neutron Activation Analysis (PGNAA)" Metal Spectral Classification using Deep Learning Method
Cheng, Ka Yung, Shayan, Helmand, Krycki, Kai, Lange-Hegermann, Markus
There is a pressing market demand to minimize the test time of Prompt Gamma Neutron Activation Analysis (PGNAA) spectra measurement machine, so that it could function as an instant material analyzer, e.g. to classify waste samples instantaneously and determine the best recycling method based on the detected compositions of the testing sample. This article introduces a new development of the deep learning classification and contrive to reduce the test time for PGNAA machine. We propose both Random Sampling Methods and Class Activation Map (CAM) to generate "downsized" samples and train the CNN model continuously. Random Sampling Methods (RSM) aims to reduce the measuring time within a sample, and Class Activation Map (CAM) is for filtering out the less important energy range of the downsized samples. We shorten the overall PGNAA measuring time down to 2.5 seconds while ensuring the accuracy is around 96.88 % for our dataset with 12 different species of substances. Compared with classifying different species of materials, it requires more test time (sample count rate) for substances having the same elements to archive good accuracy. For example, the classification of copper alloys requires nearly 24 seconds test time to reach 98 % accuracy.
Machine Learning guided high-throughput search of non-oxide garnets
Schmidt, Jonathan, Wang, Haichen, Schmidt, Georg, Marques, Miguel
Garnets, known since the early stages of human civilization, have found important applications in modern technologies including magnetorestriction, spintronics, lithium batteries, etc. The overwhelming majority of experimentally known garnets are oxides, while explorations (experimental or theoretical) for the rest of the chemical space have been limited in scope. A key issue is that the garnet structure has a large primitive unit cell, requiring an enormous amount of computational resources. To perform a comprehensive search of the complete chemical space for new garnets,we combine recent progress in graph neural networks with high-throughput calculations. We apply the machine learning model to identify the potential (meta-)stable garnet systems before systematic density-functional calculations to validate the predictions. In this way, we discover more than 600 ternary garnets with distances to the convex hull below 100~meV/atom with a variety of physical and chemical properties. This includes sulfide, nitride and halide garnets. For these, we analyze the electronic structure and discuss the connection between the value of the electronic band gap and charge balance.
The Digital Transformation Journey of Vedanta
"In a world full of disruptions, the need for digital transformation is not a choice but a requirement that every organisation, big or small, has to undertake," says Vineet Jaiswal, chief digital and technology officer at Vedanta Resources Limited. With the advancements in IT, it becomes mandatory for all businesses to deploy technologies like analytics, AI and utilise cloud-based systems to help them keep abreast with modern ways that help businesses. In an exclusive interaction with Analytics India Magazine, Vineet Jaiswal speaks about how Vedanta has used the latest technologies to transform its business. AIM: What was the need for a mining company and conglomerate like Vedanta to undergo digital transformation? Vineet Jaiswal: According to me, there are four requirements or needs for digital transformation.
A Comprehensive Review of Digital Twin -- Part 2: Roles of Uncertainty Quantification and Optimization, a Battery Digital Twin, and Perspectives
Thelen, Adam, Zhang, Xiaoge, Fink, Olga, Lu, Yan, Ghosh, Sayan, Youn, Byeng D., Todd, Michael D., Mahadevan, Sankaran, Hu, Chao, Hu, Zhen
As an emerging technology in the era of Industry 4.0, digital twin is gaining unprecedented attention because of its promise to further optimize process design, quality control, health monitoring, decision and policy making, and more, by comprehensively modeling the physical world as a group of interconnected digital models. In a two-part series of papers, we examine the fundamental role of different modeling techniques, twinning enabling technologies, and uncertainty quantification and optimization methods commonly used in digital twins. This second paper presents a literature review of key enabling technologies of digital twins, with an emphasis on uncertainty quantification, optimization methods, open source datasets and tools, major findings, challenges, and future directions. Discussions focus on current methods of uncertainty quantification and optimization and how they are applied in different dimensions of a digital twin. Additionally, this paper presents a case study where a battery digital twin is constructed and tested to illustrate some of the modeling and twinning methods reviewed in this two-part review. Code and preprocessed data for generating all the results and figures presented in the case study are available on GitHub.
NeuralSI: Structural Parameter Identification in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems
Li, Xuyang, Bolandi, Hamed, Salem, Talal, Lajnef, Nizar, Boddeti, Vishnu Naresh
Structural monitoring for complex built environments often suffers from mismatch between design, laboratory testing, and actual built parameters. Additionally, real-world structural identification problems encounter many challenges. For example, the lack of accurate baseline models, high dimensionality, and complex multivariate partial differential equations (PDEs) pose significant difficulties in training and learning conventional data-driven algorithms. This paper explores a new framework, dubbed NeuralSI, for structural identification by augmenting PDEs that govern structural dynamics with neural networks. Our approach seeks to estimate nonlinear parameters from governing equations. We consider the vibration of nonlinear beams with two unknown parameters, one that represents geometric and material variations, and another that captures energy losses in the system mainly through damping. The data for parameter estimation is obtained from a limited set of measurements, which is conducive to applications in structural health monitoring where the exact state of an existing structure is typically unknown and only a limited amount of data samples can be collected in the field. The trained model can also be extrapolated under both standard and extreme conditions using the identified structural parameters. We compare with pure data-driven Neural Networks and other classical Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs). Our approach reduces both interpolation and extrapolation errors in displacement distribution by two to five orders of magnitude over the baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/human-analysis/neural-structural-identification