Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy Goldsmiths' Seminars: AI, microscopes, and the quest for better materials

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• Prof. Sergei V. Kalinin, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, University of Tennessee
• Thursday 15 May 2025, 15:00-16:30
• Goldsmiths' 2 & https://zoom.us/j/96836714124.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Caroline Teagle.

This talk will be delivered via Zoom, but we will convene in Goldsmiths’ Lecture Theatre 2 where tea and cake will be provided, so please join us there!

In this presentation, I will illustrate how ML-driven electron and scanning probe microscopies can be leveraged to uncover structure-property relationships in complex materials, extract fundamental physical laws governing ferroelectric polarization dynamics and property evolution across combinatorial libraries, and even manipulate matter on the nanometer and atomic level. Central to this approach is the concept of probabilistic reward functions, which enable autonomous research workflows while integrating human-in-the-loop decision-making. I will demonstrate how reward-based automated characterization can be used to close the materials discovery loop, orchestrate diverse characterization tools across shared chemical spaces, and co-navigate costly experiments and epistemic uncertainty-aware theoretical models. The special case here is operationalized materials and physics discovery in combinatorial libraries, where ML-enabled scanning probe microscope autonomously performs topography and spectroscopy tuning and combinatorial space exploration. I further discuss strategies to extend these strategies towards electron microscopy bypassing the sample preparation bottleneck. Looking ahead, this work lays the foundation for the automated lab of the future, where human intuition and AI-driven autonomy work in synergy to drive materials discovery at an unprecedented scale.

This talk is part of the Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy Goldsmiths' Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Department of Materials Science & Metallurgy Goldsmiths' Seminars
• Goldsmiths' 2 & https://zoom.us/j/96836714124

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