Twice as fast at a fraction of the cost: Accelerating materials innovation through informatics

Technology progresses only as fast as the development of new, advanced materials. Modern alloys, plastics, composites, and electronic materials have made possible the impossible in countless applications, but the discovery of these materials has been way too slow for way too long. However, over the last decade there has been a paradigm shift away from trial-and-error or rudimentary design rules towards the adoption of materials informatics to greatly accelerate the discovery and development timeline.
This talk will discuss the premise behind materials informatics and will showcase a few key examples of ways that materials informatics is transforming the field with case studies in new superhard materials, 3D printable alloys, bulk metallic glasses, new LED materials and more.
I will then talk about some of the remaining challenges in this field that need to be overcome in order to unlock materials informatics to its full potential. Specifically, I will describe limitations of modern algorithms, materials representations, the difference between screening and discovery, and out-of-domain machine learning tasks.