Plenary Talk at 57th Sanibel Symposium

Professor Ong recently gave a plenary talk on “Creating It from Bit – Designing Materials by Integrating Quantum Mechanics, Informatics and Computer Science” at the 57th Sanibel Symposium held on St Simon’s Island in Georgia, USA. The slides of this talk at available on SlideShare. In this talk, he discussed two emerging trends that holds the promise to continue to push the envelope in computational design of materials. The first trend is the development of robust software and data frameworks for the automatic generation, storage and analysis of materials data sets. The second is the advent of reliable central materials data repositories, such as the Materials Project, which provides the research community with efficient access to large quantities of property information that can be mined for trends or new materials. The talk showed how we have leveraged on these new tools to accelerate discovery and design in energy and structural materials as well as our efforts in contributing back to the community through further tool or data development, and provide perspectives on future challenges in high-throughput computational materials design.

matgenb – Getting data from the Materials Project

The Materials Virtual Lab has started matgenb, a new public repository to share example notebooks that demonstrate the utilization of open-source codes for the study of materials science. We frequently get requests (from students, postdocs, collaborators, or just general users) for example codes that demonstrate various capabilities in the open-source software we maintain and contribute to, such as the Materials Project software stack comprising pymatgen, custodian, and Fireworks. This repo is a start at building a more sustainable path towards sharing of code examples. The first example notebook has been posted on Getting data from the Materials Project.