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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Powering the future: How the DOE is fueling nuclear fuel cycle research and development
As global interest in nuclear energy surges, the United States must remain at the forefront of research and development to ensure national energy security, advance nuclear technologies, and promote international cooperation on safety and nonproliferation. A crucial step in achieving this is analyzing how funding and resources are allocated to better understand how to direct future research and development. The Department of Energy has spearheaded this effort by funding hundreds of research projects across the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program (NEUP). This initiative has empowered dozens of universities to collaborate toward a nuclear-friendly future.
A. Sharif Heger, Billy V. Koen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 107 | Number 2 | February 1991 | Pages 142-157
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE91-A15728
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A adaptive interface KNOWBOT® was designed to solve some of the problems that face the users of large centralized data bases. The interface applies the neural network approach to information retrieval from a data base. The data base is a subset of the Nuclear Plant Reliability Data System. The interface KNOWBOT preempts an existing data base interface and works in conjunction with it. By design, KNOWBOT starts as a tabula rasa but acquires knowledge through its interactions with the user and the data base. The interface uses its gained knowledge to personalize the data base retrieval process and to induce new queries. The interface also forgets the information that is no longer needed by the user. These self-organizing features of the interface reduce the scope of the data base to the subsets that are highly relevant to the user needs. A proof-of-principal version of this interface has been implemented in Common LISP on a Texas Instruments Explorer I workstation. Experiments with KNOWBOT have been successful in demonstrating the robustness of the model especially with induction and self-organization. This paper describes the design of KNOWBOT and presents some of the experimental results.