The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory had a major presence at the second annual AI+ Expo for National Competitiveness in Washington, D.C., from June 2-4.
The event, hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project, showcased prominent players in technology, academia and government as they navigate the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. Speakers and panelists included U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine.
Several ORNL researchers in high performance computing and quantum technology contributed to the conversation through talks and demonstrations of their work.
"The AI+ Expo provided an excellent platform to showcase ORNL's advancements in AI for science and to highlight how AI is transforming the scientific discovery across theory, modeling and simulation, and experiments," said Prasanna Balaprakash, director of artificial intelligence programs at ORNL.
Balaprakash presented alongside Ben Mintz, director for the Interconnected Science Ecosystem, or INTERSECT, detailing how AI plays a major role in research initiatives across the lab.
Amir Sadovnik demonstrated his work using tools developed at ORNL's Center for AI Security Research, or CAISER, to defend models against adversarial AI attacks in national security applications.
Although the expo had a lot of focus on uses of AI for national security, there was less of a focus on the security of AI models themselves. I am happy we got to raise awareness for this critical issue and show how CAISER is working on detecting AI vulnerabilities and mitigating these risks.
"Although the expo had a lot of focus on uses of AI for national security, there was less of a focus on the security of AI models themselves," said Sadovnik, who serves as research lead for CAISER. "I am happy we got to raise awareness for this critical issue and show how CAISER is working on detecting AI vulnerabilities and mitigating these risks."
Other ORNL researchers demonstrated their latest work. Massimiliano Lupo Pasini showcased how ORNL's in‑house, scalable graph‑neural‑network framework can be applied to develop, train and validate graph‑based foundation models. Verónica Melesse Vergarra detailed new capabilities from the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, or OLCF, to support the deployment of biomedical Retrieval Augmented Generation pipelines on ORNL's Frontier CITADEL environment. The Frontier supercomputer was the first to break the exascale barrier and is the world's fastest system for open science. Frontier is housed at the OLCF, a DOE Office of Science user facility, and the CITADEL security framework is intended to provide researchers with resources and protocols that allow them to process protected data at scale.
"The SCSP's AI Expo was a valuable opportunity to connect with agencies and organizations working in diverse applications of AI," said Melesse Vergara. "It was exciting to hear from leaders in the field and to showcase the AI capabilities available at OLCF, as well as our cross-agency collaboration with NIH (National Institutes of Health) and NSF (National Science Foundation) through the NAIRR (National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource) Secure Pilot."
Researchers Prasanna Date and Kathleen Hamilton conducted a joint demonstration exploring two use cases to show how AI and quantum computing can work together.
"It was great to connect and network with researchers from other DOE national labs as well as academia and industry," said Date. "I was looking for and was able to find research themes in neuromorphic computing and quantum machine learning being pursued at other places."
In a fireside chat during the expo, Sec. Wright praised the national labs for their commitment to recognizing the need to advance AI across the nation.
"The most important thing is having the right people and a culture that binds them in a mission that they believe in that drives them forward. I would say where that culture exists the best right now is the labs. They've got a long history, they're competitive in that they all want to innovate the fastest, but they're very cooperative as well. The culture and the quality of the people in the national labs is fantastic," said Secretary Wright. "A lot of what the labs do is fundamental science. The labs have been great, and AI has been in dialogue everywhere."
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science . - Mark Alewine
