Ryan Lewis

Brian Hsu, Priyanka V Setty, Rory M Butler et al.

Automating experimental protocol design and execution remains as a fundamental bottleneck in realizing self-driving laboratories. We introduce PRISM (Protocol Refinement through Intelligent Simulation Modeling), a framework that automates the design, validation, and execution of experimental protocols on a laboratory platform composed of off-the-shelf robotic instruments. PRISM uses a set of language-model-based agents that work together to generate and refine experimental steps. The process begins with automatically gathering relevant procedures from web-based sources describing experimental workflows. These are converted into structured experimental steps (e.g., liquid handling steps, deck layout and other related operations) through a planning, critique, and validation loop. The finalized steps are translated into the Argonne MADSci protocol format, which provides a unified interface for coordinating multiple robotic instruments (Opentrons OT-2 liquid handler, PF400 arm, Azenta plate sealer and peeler) without requiring human intervention between steps. To evaluate protocol-generation performance, we benchmarked both single reasoning models and multi-agent workflow across constrained and open-ended prompting paradigms. The resulting protocols were validated in a digital-twin environment built in NVIDIA Omniverse to detect physical or sequencing errors before execution. Using Luna qPCR amplification and Cell Painting as case studies, we demonstrate PRISM as a practical end-to-end workflow that bridges language-based protocol generation, simulation-based validation, and automated robotic execution.

Adam Van Etten, Daniel Hogan, Jesus Martinez-Manso et al.

Satellite imagery analytics have numerous human development and disaster response applications, particularly when time series methods are involved. For example, quantifying population statistics is fundamental to 67 of the 231 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Indicators, but the World Bank estimates that over 100 countries currently lack effective Civil Registration systems. To help address this deficit and develop novel computer vision methods for time series data, we present the Multi-Temporal Urban Development SpaceNet (MUDS, also known as SpaceNet 7) dataset. This open source dataset consists of medium resolution (4.0m) satellite imagery mosaics, which includes 24 images (one per month) covering >100 unique geographies, and comprises >40,000 km2 of imagery and exhaustive polygon labels of building footprints therein, totaling over 11M individual annotations. Each building is assigned a unique identifier (i.e. address), which permits tracking of individual objects over time. Label fidelity exceeds image resolution; this "omniscient labeling" is a unique feature of the dataset, and enables surprisingly precise algorithmic models to be crafted. We demonstrate methods to track building footprint construction (or demolition) over time, thereby directly assessing urbanization. Performance is measured with the newly developed SpaceNet Change and Object Tracking (SCOT) metric, which quantifies both object tracking as well as change detection. We demonstrate that despite the moderate resolution of the data, we are able to track individual building identifiers over time. This task has broad implications for disaster preparedness, the environment, infrastructure development, and epidemic prevention.

Jacob Shermeyer, Thomas Hossler, Adam Van Etten et al.

RarePlanes is a unique open-source machine learning dataset that incorporates both real and synthetically generated satellite imagery. The RarePlanes dataset specifically focuses on the value of synthetic data to aid computer vision algorithms in their ability to automatically detect aircraft and their attributes in satellite imagery. Although other synthetic/real combination datasets exist, RarePlanes is the largest openly-available very-high resolution dataset built to test the value of synthetic data from an overhead perspective. Previous research has shown that synthetic data can reduce the amount of real training data needed and potentially improve performance for many tasks in the computer vision domain. The real portion of the dataset consists of 253 Maxar WorldView-3 satellite scenes spanning 112 locations and 2,142 km^2 with 14,700 hand-annotated aircraft. The accompanying synthetic dataset is generated via AI.Reverie's simulation platform and features 50,000 synthetic satellite images simulating a total area of 9331.2 km^2 with ~630,000 aircraft annotations. Both the real and synthetically generated aircraft feature 10 fine grain attributes including: aircraft length, wingspan, wing-shape, wing-position, wingspan class, propulsion, number of engines, number of vertical-stabilizers, presence of canards, and aircraft role. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the real and synthetic datasets and compare performances. By doing so, we show the value of synthetic data for the task of detecting and classifying aircraft from an overhead perspective.

Jacob Shermeyer, Daniel Hogan, Jason Brown et al.

Within the remote sensing domain, a diverse set of acquisition modalities exist, each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Yet, most of the current literature and open datasets only deal with electro-optical (optical) data for different detection and segmentation tasks at high spatial resolutions. optical data is often the preferred choice for geospatial applications, but requires clear skies and little cloud cover to work well. Conversely, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors have the unique capability to penetrate clouds and collect during all weather, day and night conditions. Consequently, SAR data are particularly valuable in the quest to aid disaster response, when weather and cloud cover can obstruct traditional optical sensors. Despite all of these advantages, there is little open data available to researchers to explore the effectiveness of SAR for such applications, particularly at very-high spatial resolutions, i.e. <1m Ground Sample Distance (GSD). To address this problem, we present an open Multi-Sensor All Weather Mapping (MSAW) dataset and challenge, which features two collection modalities (both SAR and optical). The dataset and challenge focus on mapping and building footprint extraction using a combination of these data sources. MSAW covers 120 km^2 over multiple overlapping collects and is annotated with over 48,000 unique building footprints labels, enabling the creation and evaluation of mapping algorithms for multi-modal data. We present a baseline and benchmark for building footprint extraction with SAR data and find that state-of-the-art segmentation models pre-trained on optical data, and then trained on SAR (F1 score of 0.21) outperform those trained on SAR data alone (F1 score of 0.135).

Adam Van Etten, Jacob Shermeyer, Daniel Hogan et al.

Identification of road networks and optimal routes directly from remote sensing is of critical importance to a broad array of humanitarian and commercial applications. Yet while identification of road pixels has been attempted before, estimation of route travel times from overhead imagery remains a novel problem, particularly for off-nadir overhead imagery. To this end, we extract road networks with travel time estimates from the SpaceNet MVOI dataset. Utilizing the CRESIv2 framework, we demonstrate the ability to extract road networks in various observation angles and quantify performance at 27 unique nadir angles with the graph-theoretic APLS_length and APLS_time metrics. A minimal gap of 0.03 between APLS_length and APLS_time scores indicates that our approach yields speed limits and travel times with very high fidelity. We also explore the utility of incorporating all available angles during model training, and find a peak score of APLS_time = 0.56. The combined model exhibits greatly improved robustness over angle-specific models, despite the very different appearance of road networks at extremely oblique off-nadir angles versus images captured from directly overhead.