NETL’s Chief Information Officer Antonio Ferreira, Ph.D., and Kelly Rose, Ph.D., a geo-data scientist in the Lab’s Research and Innovation Center, participated in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Cyber Conference, May 14-16, 2019, in Denver, Colorado. The conference brought together the DOE enterprise, federal interagency partners, academia, international collaborators and private industry to advance cyber and information technology (IT) modernization efforts across DOE's diverse and shared missions.

Ferreira was co-author on a talk that focused on the delivery of innovative solutions to DOE enterprise customers while considering concepts like the internet of things, smart cities, the cloud, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Ferreira — who has more than 20 years of experience as a researcher, software developer and senior manager — oversees NETL’s information technology and computing systems and works to develop strategic planning in support of research computing at the Lab. He has an extensive background in high-performance computing and high-performance storage systems for big data applications and has served as a grant reviewer for the Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Division of the Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation.

Rose, an invited panelist, participated in a discussion focused on how the federal government plays an important role in facilitating artificial intelligence (AI) research and development (R&D), promoting the trust of the American people in the development and deployment of AI-related technologies, training a workforce capable of using AI in their occupations and protecting the American AI technology base from attempted acquisition by strategic competitors and adversarial nations.

Furthermore, the panel focused on how continued federal government leadership in AI is of paramount importance to maintaining the economic and national security of the United States. Panelists discussed how DOE R&D, in concert with national laboratories, industry partners and academic stakeholders, seeks to support efforts intended to achieve the following goals:

• Drive technological breakthroughs to promote scientific discovery, economic competitiveness and national security.
• Develop the appropriate technical standards and reduce barriers to the safe testing and deployment of AI technologies to enable the creation of new AI-related industries and the adoption of AI by today’s industries.
• Train current and future generations of American workers with the skills to develop and apply AI technologies to prepare them for today’s economy and the jobs of the future.

Rose is the principal investigator for DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy (FE) Energy Data eXchange platform (EDX), a virtual, online data library and laboratory for FE R&D. She also works on a wide variety of research efforts at the Lab, where she is focused on using geologic and geospatial science to reduce uncertainty and characterize and understand spatial relationships between energy and engineered-natural systems at a range of scales. Her work involves development of new data-driven methods and tools for analysis of offshore energy, oil and gas, rare earth elements, groundwater, carbon storage and geothermal systems.

Conferences like this one showcase the value of NETL’s employees and allow the Laboratory to learn about the latest developments and innovations in IT and cyber research areas while sharing information and best practices discovered during NETL’s world-class research endeavors.