The Materials Genome Initiative and artificial intelligence
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The Materials Genome Initiative There is a profound link between the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) and artificial intelligence (AI). To demonstrate this, we must first define what is meant by each. MGI is a federal “initiative,” but what does that really mean? When the US White House announces an initiative (e.g., the Brain Initiative, the National Nanotechnology Initiative, or the Materials Genome Initiative), it’s simply a statement by the US President that something is a government priority, and that relevant federal agencies should work together to address that issue. While each agency pursues their own mission, the initiative connects and harmonizes these efforts toward something greater. In the case of the MGI,1 there has been active participation and coordination by the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Department of Defense (all the service branches), as well as NASA, National Nuclear Security Administration, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and the US Geological Survey. The other term, AI, is used here in a less than rigorous manner to define a computational technique (e.g., machine learning, deep neural nets, convolutional neural nets) to discover correlations in high dimensional data sets. We will explore the connection after a tour through the MGI and the data infrastructure.
In 2011, the MGI was announced by the Obama administration2 with a goal of decreasing by 50% the time to market of a new material by accelerating its discovery, design, development, and deployment—all at a lower cost. This initiative sought to achieve these goals through the creation of a materials innovation infrastructure (MII), as shown in Figure 1. The MII (comprised of computation, experiment, and digital data) is the substrate for achieving the desirable ends detailed in the outer ring of the graphic, such as clean energy, healthier people, and enhanced security. The final (bottom right) quarter of the outer ring, nextgeneration workforce, is different, as it is both a means to MGI ends as well as its own desirable outcome. Much of MII will be open (or accessible to all who can pay), and thus accessible to the world, in the same manner as most scientific literature, but can only provide an advantage to those who can use it. The national competitive edge derives from having the sophisticated workforce that can take advantage of this infrastructure. MGI does not just foster the discovery of new materials; it’s more about developing sufficient knowledge to design materials, and then ensure their subsequent deployment by optimizing desired properties along the manufacturing continuum. The MII—computational tools, experimental tools, and digital data—are really just the elements of science and engineering. What’s profound is not these elements,
James A. Warren, Materials Genome Program, National Institute of Standards and Technology, USA; [email protected] doi:10.1557/mrs.2018.122
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• VOLUME 43 • JUNE
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