Agrawal Featured in APL Materials Video on Materials Genome Initiative
He explains how data analytics tools can help in realizing the vision of rational materials discovery and design.
A recently released introductory video, titled, "Materials Genome - A Special Topic from APL Materials" features Prof. Ankit Agrawal explaining how data analytics tools can help in realizing the vision of rational materials discovery and design. The recording spotlights Prof. Agrawal's research contribution of an invited article to APL Materials, on materials informatics and the realization of the 4th paradigm of science in materials science.
The field of materials science and engineering relies on experiments and simulations to understand the “science” of materials and subsequently "engineer" new materials with improved properties. Lately, the “big data” generated by such experiments and simulations has offered unprecedented opportunities for application of data-driven techniques in this field, the need for which has also been emphasized by the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), a federal initiative envisioning the discovery, development, manufacturing, and deployment of advanced materials twice as fast and at a fraction of the cost.
In his article, Agrawal explains how data-driven techniques are playing a big role in deciphering processing-structure-property-performance (PSPP) relationships in materials, with illustrative examples of both forward models (property prediction) and inverse models (materials discovery). Such analytics can significantly reduce time-to-insight and accelerate cost-effective materials discovery, which is the goal of MGI. Agrawal's work in this emerging field of materials informatics is supported by three MGI-related grants: AFOSR MURI, NIST CHiMaD, and DARPA SIMPLEX.
The invited journal article titled "Perspective: Materials informatics and big data: Realization of the 'fourth paradigm' of science in materials science" co-authored by Prof. Agrawal and Prof. Alok Choudhary, appears in APL Materials special issue on Materials Genome Initiative.
View the introductory video to this special issue featuring the interview.