Platja d’Aro, Spain, September 9 – 13, 2019

Webpage:  https://th.fhi-berlin.mpg.de/meetings//BiGmax-Summer-2019/

Organizers:

Gerhard Dehm
Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung, Düsseldorf, Germany
Claudia Draxl
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Matthias Scheffler
Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, Germany
Jilles Vreeken
CISPA – Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Germany

Scope:

Materials science is entering an era where the growth of data from experiments and simulations is expanding beyond a level that is addressable by established scientific methods. The so-called “4 V challenge” – concerning Volume (the amount of data), Variety (the heterogeneity of form and meaning of data), Velocity (the rate at which data may change or new data arrive), and Veracity (uncertainty of quality) is clearly becoming eminent. Issues are, for example, an early discrimination between valuable and irrelevant experimental data, understanding errors in both experiment and theory, and assigning error bars and trust levels to density-functional theory high-throughput screening results, just to name a few. Most importantly, however, is that Big Data of materials science provide a significant chance for new insight and knowledge gain when fully exploiting its information by artificial intelligence concepts and methods. All the above aspects – from data processing to exploiting the potentials of data-driven materials science – require new and dedicated approaches.

Continue reading Big Data Summer: A summer school of the BiGmax Network →

The potential energy surface (PES) is a central quantity in the modelling of materials properties. Ab initio total energy methods like density-functional theory are increasingly used to probe the PES in order to determine not only the equilibrium configurations of particular systems, but also potential energy barriers for certain processes and/or attempt frequencies. The goal of the workshop was to discuss current issues and perspectives in the underlying theoretical concepts and methods, as well as corresponding applications in the fields of heterogeneous catalysis, crystal growth, or biophysics.

After successful meetings in 1994, 1999, and 2005, the workshop stayed within the interdisciplinary tradition of the PPES series and brought together scientists with different backgrounds, e.g. in condensed matter physics, materials science, computational physics, chemistry, and industry. Experts of the field of total-energy calculations, scientists who develop or enhance methods, and those who apply the information gained by these techniques had the possibility to exchange ideas and experiences.

A special focus of the PPES-IV workshop was on big-data-driven materials science, e.g. the Materials Encyclopedia and the development of Big-Data Analytics tools for materials science of the NOMAD Center of Excellence.

Continue reading Probing Potential-Energy Surfaces (PPES IV) →