Skip to main content
Man is flying drone in hurricane aftermath, holding the controller

During Hurricanes Helene and Milton, ORNL deployed drone teams and the Mapster platform to gather and share geospatial data, aiding recovery and damage assessments. ORNL's EAGLE-I platform tracked utility outages, helping prioritize recovery efforts. Drone data will train machine learning models for faster damage detection in future disasters. 

A large group of attendees are pictured outside of Jackson Center in Huntsville, Alabama

ORNL and NASA co-hosted the fourth iteration of this invitation-only event, which brings together geospatial, computational, data and engineering experts around a theme. This year’s gathering focused on how artificial intelligence foundation models can enable geospatial digital twins. 

This is a simulated image of the project to build a new network that artificial intelligence and machine learning to steer experiments and analyze data faster and more accurately. will enable

To bridge the gap between experimental facilities and supercomputers, experts from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are teaming up with other DOE national laboratories to build a new data streaming pipeline. The pipeline will allow researchers to send their data to the nation’s leading computing centers for analysis in real time even as their experiments are taking place. 

Man in blue shirt and grey pants holds laptop and poses next to a green plant in a lab.

John Lagergren, a staff scientist in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Plant Systems Biology group, is using his expertise in applied math and machine learning to develop neural networks to quickly analyze the vast amounts of data on plant traits amassed at ORNL’s Advanced Plant Phenotyping Laboratory.

ORNL researchers have teamed up with other national labs to develop a free platform called Open Energy Data Initiative Solar Systems Integration Data and Modeling to better analyze the behavior of electric grids incorporating many solar projects. Credit: Andy Sproles/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

ORNL researchers have teamed up with other national labs to develop a free platform called Open Energy Data Initiative Solar Systems Integration Data and Modeling to better analyze the behavior of electric grids incorporating many solar projects. 

Sangkeun “Matt” Lee received the Best Poster Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 24th International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration.

Lee's paper at the August conference in Bellevue, Washington, combined weather and power outage data for three states – Texas, Michigan and Hawaii –  and used a machine learning model to predict how extreme weather such as thunderstorms, floods and tornadoes would affect local power grids and to estimate the risk for outages. The paper relied on data from the National Weather Service and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information, or EAGLE-I, database.

Sarah Walters portrait

Walters is working with a team of geographers, linguists, economists, data scientists and software engineers to apply cultural knowledge and patterns to open-source data in an effort to document and report patterns of human movement through previously unstudied spaces.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced the establishment of its Center for AI Security Research, or CAISER, to address threats already present as governments and industries around the world adopt artificial intelligence and take advantage of the benefits it promises in data processing, operational efficiencies and decision-making. Credit: Rachel Green/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced the establishment of the Center for AI Security Research, or CAISER, to address threats already present as governments and industries around the world adopt artificial intelligence and take advantage of the benefits it promises in data processing, operational efficiencies and decision-making.

Cody Lloyd stands in front of images of historical nuclear field testing. The green and red dots are the machine learning algorithm recognizing features in the image. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Cody Lloyd became a nuclear engineer because of his interest in the Manhattan Project, the United States’ mission to advance nuclear science to end World War II. As a research associate in nuclear forensics at ORNL, Lloyd now teaches computers to interpret data from imagery of nuclear weapons tests from the 1950s and early 1960s, bringing his childhood fascination into his career

Two researchers standing back to back in a grassy area

When geoinformatics engineering researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory wanted to better understand changes in land areas and points of interest around the world, they turned to the locals — their data, at least.