Unleashing Digital Data to Accelerate Materials Discovery, Development, and Deployment

The availability of large, publicly accessible digital data sets has unleashed a wave of innovation throughout numerous fields, helping solve significant problems in business, biology, and astronomy.  But the potential of such data has not yet been fully realized in materials science and engineering, in part because of the wide variety of relevant properties and methods to measure and model those properties.  This diversity, however, also stands to provide rich insights if the mysteries the data hold can be unlocked.

That’s why, earlier this month, Federal agencies jointly launched the Materials Science and Engineering Data Challenge, offering up to $25,000 for innovative approaches to using publicly available digital data to discover or model new material properties.  The challenge prize is jointly sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and National Science Foundation, and submissions will be accepted until March 31, 2016.

This first challenge from the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) provides an avenue for the materials science community to demonstrate how significant advances can be made by mining and analyzing existing materials data sets (without doing new measurements), and thereby unlock some of those mysteries.  And these advances should further inspire scientists and engineers to make more of their data digitally available and easily accessible to the public. 

In response to this challenge and building on last February’s call for more open access to materials data, Federal agencies are working with the public and private sectors to make more data publicly available and easier to find and use, making new commitments, including:

• The Federal agencies participating in the MGI launched a national web site for sharing information about the MGI, www.mgi.gov.  The site includes background information about the MGI, a range of agency-provided content (which will continue to expand) about programs and activities supporting the goals of the MGI strategic plan, links to appropriate agency web sites and resources, including Federal data resources, and MGI-related news and announcements.
• Citrine Informatics will provide MGI challenge participants automated access to the large public materials dataset available through their Citrination web site starting in September 2015, and has committed to updating the dataset with any new data collected or aggregated in response to the challenge.
• Elsevier’s Materials Today family is partnering with HPCC Systems to provide high performance computation time and online training resources to selected participants. In addition, selected entries will be considered for featured publication in Materials Discovery, and the winners will be invited to present a webinar to an international audience; more information is available at the Materials Today website.
• Springer will provide free access for challenge participants to the SpringerMaterials database from September 2015 through March 2016, and life-time access to the winners. This database contains curated data on over 3000 physical and chemical properties of more than 250,000 materials and chemical systems.
• In order to facilitate public access to this growing set of materials data resources, the Materials Accelerator Network, established by the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Michigan, and University of Wisconsin, has launched a web site with the goal of creating a comprehensive list of available materials data repositories and data analytic tools, including those described above.

As we mark the fourth anniversary of President Obama’s announcement of the MGI, I look forward to seeing how unleashing digital data can help us to achieve the initiative’s goal of discovering, developing, and deploying materials twice as quickly and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

Learn More:

• Materials Science and Engineering Data Challenge
• Materials Genome Initiative web portal, MGI.gov
• It's Time to Open Materials Science Data
• Materials Genome Initiative Strategic Plan (December 2014)
• Discover over 400 other Federal prize competitions at Challenge.gov

Lloyd Whitman is Assistant Director for Nanotechnology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he is an advisor on nanotechnology and advanced materials.