A Scalable Trie Building Algorithm for High-Throughput Phyloanalysis of Wafer-Scale Digital Evolution Experiments

Agent-based simulation platforms play a key role in enabling fast-to-run evolution experiments that can be precisely controlled and observed in detail. Availability of high-resolution snapshots of lineage ancestries from digital experiments, in particular, is key to investigations of evolvability and open-ended evolution, as well as in providing a validation testbed for bioinformatics method development. Ongoing advances in AI/ML hardware accelerator devices, such as the 850,000-processor Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE), are poised to broaden the scope of evolutionary questions that can be investigated in silico. However, constraints in memory capacity and locality characteristic of these systems introduce difficulties in exhaustively tracking phylogenies at runtime. To overcome these challenges, recent work on hereditary stratigraphy algorithms has developed space-efficient genetic markers to facilitate fully decentralized estimation of relatedness among digital organisms. However, in existing work, compute time to reconstruct phylogenies from these genetic markers has proven a limiting factor in achieving large-scale phyloanalyses. Here, we detail an improved trie-building algorithm designed to produce reconstructions equivalent to existing approaches. For modestly-sized 10,000-tip trees, the proposed approach achieves a 300-fold speedup versus existing state-of-the-art. Finally, using 1 billion genome datasets drawn from WSE simulations encompassing 954 trillion replication events, we report a pair of large-scale phylogeny reconstruction trials, achieving end-to-end reconstruction times of 2.6 and 2.9 hours. In substantially improving reconstruction scaling and throughput, presented work establishes a key foundation to enable powerful high-throughput phyloanalysis techniques in large-scale digital evolution experiments.

High-Throughput Phenotyping using Computer Vision and Machine Learning

High-throughput phenotyping refers to the non-destructive and efficient evaluation of plant phenotypes. In recent years, it has been coupled with machine learning in order to improve the process of phenotyping plants by increasing efficiency in handling large datasets and developing methods for the extraction of specific traits. Previous studies have developed methods to advance these challenges through the application of deep neural networks in tandem with automated cameras; however, the datasets being studied often excluded physical labels. In this study, we used a dataset provided by Oak Ridge National Laboratory with 1,672 images of Populus Trichocarpa with white labels displaying treatment (control or drought), block, row, position, and genotype. Optical character recognition (OCR) was used to read these labels on the plants, image segmentation techniques in conjunction with machine learning algorithms were used for morphological classifications, machine learning models were used to predict treatment based on those classifications, and analyzed encoded EXIF tags were used for the purpose of finding leaf size and correlations between phenotypes. We found that our OCR model had an accuracy of 94.31% for non-null text extractions, allowing for the information to be accurately placed in a spreadsheet. Our classification models identified leaf shape, color, and level of brown splotches with an average accuracy of 62.82%, and plant treatment with an accuracy of 60.08%. Finally, we identified a few crucial pieces of information absent from the EXIF tags that prevented the assessment of the leaf size. There was also missing information that prevented the assessment of correlations between phenotypes and conditions. However, future studies could improve upon this to allow for the assessment of these features.