Hello readers,
quick note: I’m experiencing issues with WordPress and I couldn’t publish new posts lately.It’s likely I’ll have to do a complete overhaul, so it may take a little while to get back on track.Stay tuned!
WordPress issues
Subluminal
Slower than the speed of light, but not by much
Category Archives: projects
Greater Caribbean Light Source
Last week I hosted Leo Violini, the founder of the Centro Internacional de Física in Bogotà (Columbia), and a proponent of the the Greater Caribbean Light Source
Big science in Latin America: accelerate particles and progress – Nature (March 2024)
Here is a video of his talk on the proposal for Greater Caribbean Light Source:
And a video of his second talk on science diplomacy:Rise of the Machines
Recently, there’s been a lot of interesting activity in the field generative AI for science from large companies such as Google, Meta and Microsoft.
Creating new materials from scratch is difficult, since materials involve complex interactions that are difficult to simulate, or a fair amount of luck in experiments (serendipity is scientists’s most terrifying friend)
Thus most of these efforts aim to discover new material by accelerating simulations using machine learning. But recent advances (such as LLM, e.g., ChatGPT) have shown that you can use AI to make coherent sentences instead of a word soup. But the same way cooking is not just about putting ingredient together all at once but carefully preparing them, making a new material involves important intermediate steps. And new approaches can be used create new materials.
The various steps of making a new material (from Szymanski et al.)
Last month, Google in collaboration with Berkeley Lab announced that their DeepMind’s Gnome project had discovered a lot of new structures: Google DeepMind Adds Nearly 400,000 New Compounds to Berkeley Lab’s Materials Project. They managed to actually make and analyze some of those new materials ; that is quite a tour de force, and while there’s some interesting pushback on the claims, it’s still pretty cool!
In September, I invited Meta’s Open Catalyst at Berkeley Lab (here’s the event description and the recording – accessible to lab employees only)
Zachary Ulissi (Meta/OpenCatalyst) and Jin Qian (Berkley Lab) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (September 2023)
Meanwhile, Microsoft is collaborating with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on similar topics
And it’s not limited to US tech firms: Why Is TikTok Parent ByteDance Moving Into Biology, Chemistry And Drug Discovery? – Forbes
Meanwhile, the research infrastructure has it gears moving; it seems that DeepMind’s AlphaFold is already routinely used at the lab to dream up new protein structures. I wonder where this will go!
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future– Niels Bohr
Thinkpieces blending chips and AI in full bloom:
We need a moonshot for computing – Brady Helwig and PJ Maykish, Technology Review
The Shadow of Bell Labs
I want to resurface an interesting thread by my former colleague Ilan Gur:
Synchrotron Radiation News
The issue of Synchrotron Radiation News I had the honor to co-edit with my colleagues Lucia Alianelli from Diamond Light Source is out – hot off the press!
Table of Content – Synchrotron Radiation News 36-5 issue on New Developments in Beamline Design Tools (2024)
Synchrotron Radiation News 36-5 issue on New Developments in Beamline Design Tools (2024)
Guest Editorial – Antoine Wojdyla and Lucia Alianelli
https://doi.org/10.1080/08940886.2023.2274751
Luca Rebuffi (Advanced Photon Source, USA) andManuel Sánchez del Río (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, France)
https://doi.org/10.1080/08940886.2023.227474440 Years of SHADOW: Serving Four Generations of Synchrotron Facilities
Manuel Sánchez del Río (European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, France) and Luca Rebuffi (Advanced Photon Source, USA)
https://doi.org/10.1080/08940886.2023.2274745Status of the Synchrotron Radiation Calculation Code SPECTRA: New Functions and Latest Developments
Takashi Tanaka (Spring-8, Japan)
https://doi.org/10.1080/08940886.2023.2274757Applications of “Synchrotron Radiation Workshop” Code (SRW)
Oleg Chubar and colleagues (National Synchrotron Radiation Facility, USA)
https://doi.org/10.1080/08940886.2023.2274739New Features of xrt: Bent Crystals, Coherent Modes, Waves with OAM
K. Klementiev and R. Chernikov (MavIV, Sweden)
https://doi.org/10.1080/08940886.2023.2274735Developments in X-Ray Optics Modelling at Diamond Light Source
John P. Sutter and colleagues (Diamond Light Source, UK)
https://doi.org/10.1080/08940886.2023.2274754Beamline Optics and Modeling School (BLOMS) 2023
Kenneth Goldberg (Advanced Light Source, USA)
https://doi.org/10.1080/08940886.2023.2274746
On Mentorship
This last month, I received two awards related to mentorship from Berkeley Lab. They both came as a surprise, since I consider myself more a student of mentorship than someone who has something to show for.
Berkeley Lab Outstanding Mentorship AwardDirector’s award for For building the critical foundations of a complex mentoring ecosystem
I began to be interested in mentorship after I realized that mentorship plays a large role in the success of young scientist, (1) having experience myself the difference between having no mentorship and having appropriate mentorship (I’ll be forever grateful to my mentor/colleague/supervisor Ken Goldberg), (2) having had tepid internship supervision experience due to the lack of guidance, (3) realizing that academia is ill-equipped to provide the resources necessary for success.While I was running Berkeley Lab Series X, I always asked the speakers (typically Nobel prize laureates, stellar scientists and directors of prominent research institutions) how they learned to manage a group, and they answer was generally: “on the spot, via trial and error”, what struck me as awfully wrong. If people don’t get the proper resources/training, many are likely to fail, and drag their own group down the abyss. In this post, I will try to share resources I gathered along the years, and what I learned about mentorship, and provide some resources I found useful. This is more descriptive of my experience than prescriptive, but I hope you find this useful. Continue reading
Lamaseries
It’s been a few months since the ChatGPT craze started, and we’re finally seeing some interesting courses and guidelines, particularly for coding, where I found the whole thing quite impressive.
Ad hoc use of LLaMa
Here’s a few that can be of interest, potentially growing over time (this is mostly a notes to self.)
- chat.openai.com
- ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers (Andrew Ng)
- Berkeley Lab Guidance on using Generative AI tools
- HuggingFrace’s Wizard coder
- Meta’s Code Llama, through Perplexity: labs.perplexity.ai or HuggingFace
Plus – things are getting really crazy: Large language models encode clinical knowledge (Nature, Google Research.)
Updates on AI for big science
There’s a lot of things happening on the front of AI for Big Science (AI for large scale facilities, such as synchrotrons.)
The recently published DOE report in AI for Science, Energy, and Security Report provides interesting insights, and a much-needed update to the AI for Science Report of 2020.Computing Facilities are upgrading to provide scientists the tools to engage with the latest advances in machine learning. I recently visited NERSC’s Perlmutter supercomputer, and it is LOADED with GPU for AI training.
A rack of Tesla A100 from the Perlmutter supercomputer at NERSC/Berkeley Lab
Meanwhile, companies with large computing capabilities are making interesting forays in using AI for science, for instance Meta, which is developing OpenCatalyst in collaboration with Carnegie-Mellon University, where the goal is to create AI models to speed up the study of catalysts, which are generally very computer-intensive (see the Berkeley Lab Materials Project.) Now the cool part is to verify these results using x-ray diffraction at a synchrotron facilities. Something a little similar happened with AlphaFold where newly derived structure may need to be tested with x-rays at the Advanced Light Source: Deep-Learning AI Program Accurately Predicts Key Rotavirus Protein Fold (ALS News)
Continue readingOut Of Many
Last week I was lucky to meet with Vanessa Chan, the Chief Commercialization Officer for the Department of Energy and Director of the Office of Technology Transitions. She wanted to hear what kind of hurdles when it comes to start a company (hint: a lot.) I told her that a major, overlooked issue is that you generally to be a permanent resident to start at company in the US, whereas two-thirds of postdocs are foreign nationals and on visas. There are ways to get around the requirement (such as Unshackled), but it’s a little sad not more is done to provide support to those willing and able (plus – it is a well-known trope that many US companies are founded by foreign nationals, what I tend to believe is among what sets California apart from other states and other countries, where entrepreneurship doesn’t flourish as much as expected despite many efforts)
Conversation with Vanessa Chan
Two ways to say things
I am a native French speaker, and I have always been confused by the ubiquity of English, language which is actually quite difficult to speak (why is tough, though, thought and enough so different?) And I was also puzzled the difference between liberty and freedom – no one could ever explain me the difference, even though “Freedom” is probable the most overused concept in American society (French has “Liberté” in its national motto, but is has nothing to do with “free” as in “free sample.”)
Finally, I found an interesting explanation by Jorge Luis Borges, who sees this as a feature, not a bug:I really enjoy this notion of physicality – onomatopoeia are a vibrant part of the language: whisper, gulp, slam, rumble, slushy, etc.I have done most of my reading in English. I find English a far finer language than Spanish.
Firstly, English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers—for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word. Then there is another reason.
The reason is that I think that, of all languages, English is the most physical of all languages. You can, for example, say “He loomed over.” You can’t very well say that in Spanish.
And then you have, in English, you can do almost anything with verbs and prepositions. For example, to “laugh off,” to “dream away.” Those things can’t be said in Spanish. To “live down” something, to “live up to” something—you can’t say those things in Spanish. They can’t be said. Or really in any Roman language.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
– Ludwig WittgensteinLet’s all clap for Borges!
SFMOMA x Berkeley Lab: Hybrid forms
Yesterday I invited Tanya Zimbardo from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to give a talk at Berkeley Lab (details about the even can be found here: Hybrid Forms: Connecting Art and Science)
Tanya Zimbardo (SFMONA) at Berkeley Lab
It was quite interesting to hear her perspective on a topic which is close to my heart, and happy to hear many references to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who currently has the Techs-Mechs exhibition running at the Gray Area, but also quite surprising not hear anything about Jim Campbell (whose art glows atop the Salesforce building “Eye of Sauron”) or the work of Illuminate.
Continue reading