June 3, 2020 — As part of this year’s Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences and Engineering Conference, or SMC2020, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is currently inviting teams to participate in its fourth annual Data Challenge.

Open to students, faculty and industry professionals, the contest gives teams of one to four people the opportunity to perform novel analyses on real scientific datasets provided by ORNL data sponsors. Participants can choose to enter one or more of the six categories based on datasets drawn from active research efforts at ORNL and one category based on the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge, or CORD-19.

Along with each downloadable dataset, competitors will find a series of challenge questions—most of which can be solved on a regular workstation—covering difficulty levels from novice to expert and every stage in between. Student and expert entries will be evaluated in separate categories.

Registration is open until June 22, and teams must submit a 6–8-page paper describing the approach and algorithms used to reach a solution by July 27.

After the papers are peer reviewed, the top teams will be invited to attend SMC2020—which will take place on August 25–27 at the Meadow View Conference Resort in Kingsport, Tennessee—to present a poster before the winner is crowned. Selected solutions will also be published in the SMC2020 conference proceedings as part of the Springer-Verlag Communications in Computer and Information Science series.

SMC’s top priority is the health and safety of all meeting attendees. Although the conference is currently scheduled to proceed as an in-person meeting, the planning committee is monitoring COVID-19 guidelines and travel restrictions—as well as developing alternative options for the poster session—to prepare for the possibility of transitioning SMC2020 to a virtual event.

The categories include:

• Challenge 1, neutron scattering for materials science: determine how temperature variation affects the structure of an additively manufactured material.
• Challenge 2, electron scattering for materials science: use machine learning to predict a material’s crystal structure.
• Challenge 3, urban planning: analyze energy use in buildings during varying environmental conditions.
• Challenge 4, human dynamics: observe how daily commutes affect vehicle emissions and traffic.
• Challenge 5, geophysics: use machine learning to overcome uncertainty in subsurface earth mapping based on seismic data.
• Challenge 6, health: consider how artificial intelligence techniques can match patients with their best clinical trial options.
• Challenge 7, CORD-19: tackle one of 10 tasks to help answer vital COVID-19 questions.

About Oak Ridge National Laboratory 

UT-Battelle LLC manages Oak Ridge National Laboratory for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.

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Source:  Elizabeth Rosenthal, Oak Ridge National Laboratory