Strategies for accelerating the adoption of materials informatics

Ongoing, rapid innovations in fields ranging from microelectronics, aerospace, and automotive to defense, energy, and health demand new advanced materials at even greater rates and lower costs. Traditional materials R&D methods offer few paths to achieve both outcomes simultaneously. Materials informatics, while a nascent field, offers such a promise through screening, growing databases of materials for new applications, learning new relationships from existing data resources, and building fast predictive models. We highlight key materials informatics successes from the atomic-scale modeling community, and discuss the ecosystem of open data, software, services, and infrastructure that have led to broad adoption of materials informatics approaches. We then examine emerging opportunities for informatics in materials science and describe an ideal data ecosystem capable of supporting similar widespread adoption of materials informatics, which we believe will enable the faster design of materials.