Artificial Intelligence Aids Materials Fabrication

“Unsupervised” means that the training data is unannotated, and the system instead learns to cluster data together according to structural similarities. Because materials-recipe extraction is a new area of research, Olivetti and her colleagues didn’t have the luxury of large, annotated data sets accumulated over years by diverse teams of researchers. The researchers hope that further work will improve the system’s accuracy, and in ongoing work they are exploring a battery of deep learning techniques that can make further generalizations about the structure of materials recipes, with the goal of automatically devising recipes for materials not considered in the existing literature. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the MIT Energy Initiative, the Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Science Program, and the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.