About

Summary

Accelerating materials discovery is an emerging theme in a number of BES and government reports and has been the topic of several recent scientific workshops. The Materials Genome Initiative is part of a bold plan to boost US manufacturing by halving the time it takes to discover and design new materials. In this plan, accelerating discovery relies on using large databases, computation, and mathematics in the material sciences in a manner similar to the way that they were used to make the Human Genome Initiative a success for the biological sciences. Novel approaches are therefore being called for that can explore the enormous phase space presented by complex materials and processes. If we are to achieve the desired performance gains, then we must have a predictive capability that can guide experiments and computations in the most fruitful directions by reducing the possibilities that need to be tried.

However, to meaningfully adapt the spirit of "genomics" style research in materials science, we need to first identify and map the "genes" across length and time scales. Despite advances in computation and experimental techniques generating vast arrays of data;  without a clear way to link that to models, the full value of data driven discovery will not be realized. Hence along with experimental, theoretical and computational materials science, we need to add a "fourth leg" to our toolkit to make the "Materials Genome" a reality, the science of Materials Informatics.

The aim of this three-day conference is to address this challenge by bringing together the materials and information science communities to evaluate the opportunities and challenges in the emerging field of materials informatics. Researchers will present contrasting but complementary approaches, such as those based on high throughput calculations or data driven discovery, together with the merits of machine-learning methods to accommodate searches with multiple objectives or higher dimensional databases.  Similarly, statistical methods successfully applied in the other fields such as biosciences, and geosciences based on the use prior knowledge, so that they allow for prediction with predetermined confidence estimates, will be presented. We aim to have sessions spanning materials and information science issues with a discussion period to forge cross-disciplinary interactions and a roadmap for research and education in Materials Informatics.

This is the second conference in an international workshop series on Mapping the Materials Genome, following the 1st International Summer School on Molecular and Materials Informatics in Melbourne, Australia in January 2013.

Organizing Committee:

F.J. Alexander & T. Lookman (LANL)

K. Rajan (ISU)

N. Adams (CSIRO)

Confirmed Speakers:

N. Adams (CSIRO)
A. Balazs (U Pitt)
N. Benedek (UT Austin)
C. Breneman (RPI)
K. Chandrika (LLNL)
W-Y. Ching (Missouri)
L. Dalton (OSU)
E. Dougherty (TAMU)
B. Ganapathysubramanian (ISU)
S. Ghosh (JHU)
D. Hess (NSF)
B. Jones (IBM)
S. Kalidindi (Georgia Tech)
M. Krien (Lockhead Martin)
M. McKerns (Caltech)
A. Novrotsky (UC Davis)
Z. Nussinov (Washington)
W. Powell (Princeton)
H. Rabitz (Princeton)
K. Rajan (ISU)
R. Ramesh (ORNL)
J. Randonelli (Drexel)
R. Ramprasad (CT)
I. Tanaka (Kyoto)
J. Warren (NIST)