Update: This initiative has been featured on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy blog.
The Air Force Research Lab in partnership with the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Standards and Technology has announced the Materials Science and Engineering Data Challenge. This Grand Challenge aims to demonstrate how publicly accessible digital data can be used to advance Materials Science and Engineering knowledge, accelerate materials discovery and facilitate integration into new technologies.
In support of community members wishing to enter the challenge, Materials Today has partnered with HPCC Systems to provide 3 packages for training and computation time on the High Performance Computing Cluster. Materials Today now invites researchers with a need for high intensity computation time to propose projects that fit within the scope of the Grand Challenge: one page entries may be uploaded here. In addition, we will invite authors of a selection of entries to turn their submissions into journal articles, and considered for publication in Materials Discovery, which aims to be a premier forum for informatics and machine-learning approaches applied to materials science.
Our support support for researchers interested in entering the challenge follows on from our move to establish data-sharing capabilities to an array of Elsevier titles (for more details, please see Materials Genome Initiative announced earlier this year. This initiative has resulted in almost 35 data-articles accepted for publication in the Materials Science section of Data-in-Brief, most linked to one of the participating journals. The data described in these articles is readily available to be used in the challenge.
Materials Today will also be one of the co-organizers of the session at MS&T where the winning entries will be invited to present their approach; the winner will also be considered for a webinar on the Materials Today website to discuss their findings.
A listing of resources available to entrants can be found on the Materials Accelerator Network website.
Details about the challenge can be found on the dedicated page on challenge.gov, in brief:
Submission Dates : Jul 01, 2015 - Mar 31, 2016
Judging Dates : Apr 01, 2016 - May 11, 2016
Winners Announced: May 11, 2016
About HPCC:
HPCC Systems® (www.hpccsystems.com) from LexisNexis® Risk Solutions offers a proven, data-intensive supercomputing platform, designed for the enterprise, to process and solve Big Data analytical problems. As an alternative to legacy technology, HPCC Systems offers a consistent data-centric programming language, two processing platforms and a single, complete end-to-end architecture for efficient processing. LexisNexis Risk Solutions and HPCC Systems are part of RELX Group plc, a world-leading provider of information solutions for professional customers across industries. In support of the Grand Challenge, LexisNexis will provide access to HPCC Systems and online training resources.