Hackathon aims to solve materials problems
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Hackathon aims to solve materials problems
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leary eyes and a taxed brain are common at Materials Research Society (MRS) Meetings, but for the first time, a group of intrepid attendees had a very different reason for their weariness than the typical gauntlet of talks and networking sessions. During the 2014 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston, 14 materials scientists came together for 24 hours for MatHack, the world’s first materials hackathon, to solve real materials problems. A hackathon is a sprint computer programming competition where participants collaborate to create software from scratch in intense sessions over one or two days. Sponsored, in part, by Citrine Informatics and driven by two of its founders (Bryce Meredig and Greg Mulholland) in collaboration with the MRS Academic Affairs Committee, MatHack participants pitched ideas, formed teams, spent one night writing code, and presented their work to a panel of judges from across the materials community.
The idea behind a hackathon is to very quickly build functional (yet imperfect) software to lay the foundation for further development in the future. Such events are common in Silicon Valley; Google and Facebook are renowned hackathon hosts and sponsors. Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive officer of Facebook, has explained that “hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done.”1 The participants at the first MatHack did just that, demonstrating that even in a field like materials science—traditionally associated with longer-term laboratory investigations—people can produce creative, meaningful scientific software contributions in a very short time. MatHack participants hailed from wideranging backgrounds within the materials community. Some were experienced computational materials scientists with tremendous coding backgrounds. Others were experimentalists with practical problems
Hackathon participants, judges, and organizers (front row, left to right): Brendan Nagle (Dartmouth College), Katie Van Aken (Drexel University), Sabrina Ball (MIT), Ioan-Bogdan Magdau (The University of Edinburgh); (second row, left to right): Anubhav Jain (Lawrence Berkeley Lab), Timothy Large (Microsoft Applied Sciences), Nicole Adelstein (Lawrence Livermore National Lab), Rick Barto (Lockheed Martin), Susan Ermer (Lockheed Martin), Bryce Meredig (Citrine Informatics), Guoqiang Xu (MIT); (third row, left to right): Andre Schleife (Univ. Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Oleg Rubel (McMaster/TBRRI), Wenhao Sun (MIT), Greg Mulholland (Citrine Informatics).
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MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 40 • APRIL 2015
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www.mrs.org/bulletin
to solve as well as professors and postdocs with a desire to build something new. The participants included people from universities all over the world, spanning academia, industry, and national labs. Participants first gathered in The Hub, the central area of the Fall Meeting, and gave 30-second pitches for ideas that addressed a very broad prompt: “Build a piece of software that would be useful to a materials
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