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Machine Learning Tool Could Provide Unexpected Scientific Insights into COVID-19

April 29, 2020

CSCHOLAR

Berkeley Lab researchers (clockwise from top left) Kristin Persson, John Dagdelen, Gerbrand Ceder, and Amalie Trewartha led development of COVIDScholar. (Credit: Berkeley Lab)

Science Achievement       

Working closely with NERSC, a team of materials scientists at Berkeley Lab have created a text-mining tool in record time to help the global scientific community synthesize the mountain of scientific literature on COVID-19 being generated every day.

Significance and Impact

The CUPID-Mo experiment is among a field of experiments using a variety of approaches to detect a theorized particle process, called neutrinoless double-beta decay, that could revise our understanding of ghostly particles called neutrinos and of their role in the evolution of the universe. Preliminary results from CUPID-Mo, based on analysis of data collected from March 2019 to April 2020, set a new world-leading limit for the neutrinoless double-beta decay process in an isotope of molybdenum known as Mo-100 (<1.4 per 14x1023 years!)

Research Details

Assisted by quick access to NERSC’s Cori supercomputer, the center’s “Spin” internal cloud for edge services, and expert staff assistance from NERSC staff, a prototype was created in just seven days. State-of-the-art natural language processing models run daily on Cori, and the search portal is running on the NERSC “Spin” edge services cluster.

Related Links

COVIDScholar: An automated COVID-19 research aggregation and analysis platform https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.03891

Machine Learning Tool Could Provide Unexpected Scientific Insights into COVID-19


About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.