MADISON, WI. — Members of the cross-disciplinary community that integrates materials domain experts and data scientists from all fields gathered here in February to attend the workshop “Opportunities in Materials Informatics,” on the University of Wisconsin Campus.

The workshop was presented by the Materials Accelerator Network, which includes Georgia Tech Institute for Materials, University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Michigan.

The goal of the workshop was to highlight innovative applications of informatics in materials science and to engage both materials and data scientists in a more integrated community. The workshop was focused on being a “brainstorming session” with a small number of speakers and plenty of discussion, attempting to yield both novel ideas and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

Representatives from Georgia Tech included David McDowell, IMat executive director; Surya Kalidindi, Professor, Director of Materials Informatics for Engineering Design Group; and Martha Grover, Associate Professor, ChBE.

“We are in a materials data revolution that is opening unprecedented opportunities for materials informatics,” said Dane Morgan, professor, materials science and engineering at the UWM. “There are so many areas in our community that have a stake in this research – computer science, statistics, mathematics, chemometrics, bioinformatics—all with the focus of expediting the full value of current and future materials data.”

The workshop highlighted new applications of informatics in materials science and attendees discussed current trends, including high-throughput computation and experiment, massive increases in the scale of data generated in many experiments (e.g., tomographic methods), government mandated sharing of public data, transformative commitments to online accessible data (e.g., the Materials Project and the Materials Data Facility), and funding support such as the Materials Genome Initiative are creating a data explosion.

To view presentations featured during the two-day workshop, click here.