U of T & NUS partner to build world’s largest open materials dataset

With nearly $10 million in funding from Singapore’s National Research Foundation (NRF), and initial seed funding from U of T and NUS, the launch of the MDF will establish a new open autonomous lab in Singapore, built to solve a major bottleneck in materials innovation: the lack of large, high-quality datasets impeding the effective use of artificial intelligence (AI) in accelerated discovery.  

“Our goal is to accelerate science for solid-state materials,” said U of T Professor and AC Director Alán Aspuru-Guzik. “Predicting the structures of materials is simply not enough now. We are closing the loop between AI suggestions, robotic synthesis and in-situ feedback — tracing the paths that lead to new working materials that make an impact in the real world.”

In collaboration with technology companies Nvidia and VeChain, the MDF will allow for AI to recommend not just what to make, but how to make it - reliably and at scale. As the world’s largest open materials dataset, the MDF will help shorten the path from idea to industrial use in various sectors, from low-power and quantum-ready electronics to catalysts for clean energy and coatings for durable infrastructure.  

“Synthesis pathways of materials encode their composition, structure and morphology, thus determining their realistic properties,” said Professor Sir Konstantin Novoselov, Director of I-FIM, who won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for his world-changing experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene. “The MDF turns abstract predictions into practical recipes by feeding real synthesis data into AI models.”

For the full announcement and to learn more about the Materials Data Foundry, click here.