AI for Functional Materials

Ruhr Symposium 2024 sheds light on artificial intelligence in materials research

The Ruhr Symposium 2024 was held under the motto “AI for Functional Materials” and presented insights into the application of artificial intelligence in materials science. Three sessions and two keynotes by experts from science and industry covered key topics such as data management, material processes and material informatics.

Prof. Dr. Frederik Ahlemann, holder of the Chair of Information Systems and Strategic IT Management at the University of Duisburg-Essen, opened the symposium with the scientific keynote on the topic: “The Underestimated Revolution: On the transformative power of AI and our struggle to understand it”. Prof. Ahlemann made it clear how profound the transformation brought about by AI is and what challenges it poses. He focused in particular on human factors such as biases.

The industry keynote was given by Dr. Henrik Hahn, Chief Digital Officer at Evonik. Under the title “How can artificial intelligence make specialty chemicals smarter and faster?”, Hahn explained how AI accelerates and optimizes the development of specialty chemicals. He emphasized the importance of AI in the industry to develop innovative materials more efficiently.

The first session dealt with the topic of data management. Dr. Ahmed Mansour from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin presented how the FAIR data concept (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) can be used for materials research as part of the FAIRmat and NOMAD projects. Dr. Dagmar Dirzus from KROHNE Messtechnik shed light on the challenges and opportunities of successfully anchoring AI solutions in the manufacturing industry.

The second session focused on the automation of material processes. Materials Chain member Prof. Dr. Thomas Kirchartz from the Faculty of Engineering at UDE and Forschungszentrum Jülich presented how machine learning is used in solar cell research. Florian Huber from hte GmbH showed how improved experimental workflows can provide industry-relevant data and accelerate materials research and development.

The last session of the day was dedicated to materials informatics. Yixuan Zhang from TU Darmstadt presented methods for generative reconstruction and generation of microstructures using stable diffusion. Dr. Tian Xie from Microsoft Research AI4Science explained in a recorded presentation how AI emulators and generators can accelerate material design by helping to find a match between requirements and material properties.

https://www.uni-due.de/cenide/en/news-detail.php?id=ai-for-functional-materials