April 2018

In early April 2018, the Materials Research Society held their spring meeting and exhibit at the Phoenix, Arizona convention center.  With over 110 symposium presentations, it was difficult to select which sessions to attend.  But one forum caught my eye, “AI for Materials Development”.  These days AI seems to be everywhere.  
 
As we all speculate about the impact of AI on autonomous driving and the next killer app, Carla Gomes, Professor of Computer Science and director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University, is focusing on large-scale constraint-based reasoning.  She pointed out that AI still can’t compete with good ol’ human common sense.  Human reasoning and inference planning are still lacking in most AI systems.  One of the key fundamentals of AI is building a neural network that resembles the human brain.  Even with the advancements of 7nm silicon technology, this is a daunting task, not to mention the complexities of software algorithms to mimic the human thought and decision process.
 
But in the world of materials development, AI excels.  By integrating material experimentation and AI, the discovery of new materials and the application of materials in the real world is progressing at an accelerated pace.  AI is capable of developing the hypotheses and—along with robotics—is following through with new scientific discovery.