Federal agencies announce materials data challenge
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Federal agencies announce materials data challenge www.challenge.gov/challenge/materials-science-and-engineering-data-challenge
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ifty thousand dollars is up for grabs for the winners of the Materials Science and Engineering Data Challenge, launched earlier this year by the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Science Foundation. The goal: to leverage existing digital data to incentivize advancements in materials science and engineering knowledge. The Challenge calls upon participants, or “solvers,” to submit data analysis approaches that significantly accelerate either the discovery of new materials to meet an application need, or
the development of new models describing processing–structure–property relationships. Data used in the Challenge must be publicly accessible and have sufficient supporting information, or metadata, to enable reuse by researchers who did not originally generate it. The US federal government’s Challenge.gov platform, which has facilitated hundreds of federal agency competitions since it was established in 2010, is hosting the Challenge. It is the first such challenge that focuses broadly on materials science, and also the first that expressly supports the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), a multiagency
Lattice matching between a nucleation agent (likasite, bottom phase) and a phase-change material of interest for thermal energy storage (lithium nitrate trihydrate, top phase). Database screening techniques allowed rapid identification of 10s of candidate nucleation agents, including likasite, from an initial pool of more than 100,000. Credit: P. Shamberger and M. O’Malley, published in Acta Materialia.
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MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 40 • NOVEMBER 2015
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www.mrs.org/bulletin
effort now in its fifth year that intends to significantly reduce the time and cost to bring new materials to market by more closely linking experimental tools, computational tools, and digital data. The Challenge emphasizes two aspects of digital data—data access and the application of computer science techniques to analyze materials data. In addition, the Challenge criteria place a priority on gaining new insights through data reuse—an approach more common in fields like biology and astronomy. “Something like two-thirds of the research done on Hubble data wasn’t done by the original PIs [principal investigators]. It was done by other people going back into the data,” says Jim Warren, Director of the Materials Genome Project at NIST. “If [the participants] use their own data, it’s a small change from the typical research modality. We’re looking for someone who’s been much more creative in assembling information from at least one source outside their own work.” Chuck Ward, Lead for Integrated Computational Materials Science and Engineering at AFRL, sees an increased return on investment from analyzing reused data. “For example, numerous tensile experiments have been performed on single-crystal materials, yet typically only one point off th
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