I participated in a French Alumni “Cafe virtuel“, organized by the French Alumni association and talking about my professional journey and my research.
Here is the recording: Continue readingSubluminal
Slower than the speed of light, but not by much
Category Archives: science life
Missing millions
(this is a blog entry that was initially a bluesky post – you can follow me at bsky.app/profile/antonymous.bsky.social)
Total US population by Age and Characteristics in December 2024
I was reading the latest report from the @nationalacademies.org on global talents, and the need for a strategy to recruit and train talents. One sentence in the preface about the “missing millions” really caught my attention:
Continue reading
CILAC – Synchrotrons in the Greater Caribbean and Beyond
The Latin American and Caribbean Open Science Forum (CILAC – Foro Abierto de Ciencias de Latinoamérica y el Caribe), an event organized by UNESCO had a satellite even on GCLS/LAMISTAD Symposium: Synchrotrons in the Greater Caribbean and Beyond (website) to which I participated (and help organize)
Day 1:https://www.youtube.com/live/LFEzfNRtfXQDay 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo_U1suKibDay 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SP1h0OHqoIc
The State of the Science Address – National Academy of Science
I stumbled upon the The State of the Science Address from Marcia McNutt, the President of the National Academy of Science, through the always very interesting AIP FYI weekly newsletter.
Here’s a tl;dr version:- The US win 15% of the medals at the Olympics, but 60% of the Nobel – really efficient at attracting and retaining talents
- The US science workforce is increasingly International, but the US become less attractive (and visas are getting harder to get)
- China is rapidly increasing as a global force in science. Not only they publish a lot of science, but the quality of the output has increased
- International collaboration is important to avoid the possibility a single player flaunts the rules.
- researchers are underpaid (industry pays 70% better)
- The quality of STEM education in K-12 is not keeping pace with the world
- Philanthropy is a major funder of science (about 10%)
- Public support for science is important
Concluding slide from from Marcia McNutt’s State of the Science Address (full talk)
Five years ago, I had a chance to meet Dr. McNutt at Berkeley Lab. She was seeking input from postdocs on how the envisioned science.
An old picture from 2019 with the President of the National Academy of Science Marcia McNutt and the Berkeley Lab postdocs (my besties Sinead, Valentine, Fadji, Maria and I)
I told her that I really enjoyed being a scientist in federal lab (i.e. not a professor on campus), but I bluntly put that in my opinion academia (on campuses) is increasingly becoming a ponzi scheme – the PI recruits postdocs who take care of grad student who supervise intern. I guess she doesn’t disagree.
Opportunity slides from from Marcia McNutt’s State of the Science Address (full talk)
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:
Hotline bling
I was lucky to meet the President of the University of California Michael V. Drake, in my capacity of co-chair of the Berkeley Lab Global Employee Resource group (global.lbl.gov), dedicated to providing support to international employees at the national laboratory.
Berkeley Lab Employee Resource Groups meeting with UC president Michael Drake in November 2023
I made the point the re-building communities should be a priority after the pandemic, and particularly early career scientists, who do not have family or go to school where they could thread their social fabric. The participation of international scientist at Berkeley Lab is an important strength, because the national lab is de facto at the center of international research, and that gives it a competitive edge compared to other countries such as China or Saudi Arabia, where large research expenditure cannot compensate the lack of free flow of ideas.
I think my talking points were well received, and president Drake encouraged collaboration on these topics with the University of California, BerkeleyOn 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
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