Artiffcial Intelligence Enabled Smart Design and Manufacturing of Advanced Materials: The Endless Frontier in AI+ Era

EXTENDED ABSTRACT: Future-oriented Science & Technology (S&T) Strategies trigger the innovative developments of advanced materials, providing an envision to the significant progress of leading-/cutting-edge science, engineering and technologies for the next few decades. Motivated by Made in China 2025 and New Material Power Strategy by 2035, several key viewpoints about automated research workflows for accelerated discovery and smart manufacturing of advanced materials in term of AI for Science and main respective of big data, database, standards and ecosystems are discussed. Referring to classical toolkits at various spatial and temporal scales, AI-based toolkits and AI-enabled computations for materials design are compared, highlighting the dominate role of AI Agent paradigm. Our recent developed ProME platform together with its functions is introduced brieffy. A case study of AI Agent assistant welding is presented, which is consisted of the large language model, auto-coding via AI Agent, image processing, image mosaic, and machine learning for welding defect detection. Finally, more duties are called to educate the next generation workforce with creative minds and skills. It is believed that the transformation of knowledge-enabled data-driven ICME era to AI+ era promotes the transformation of smart design and manufacturing paradigm from “designing the materials” to “designing with materials”.

Brief Introduction of Speaker
William-Yi Wang

William Yi Wang received his M.S. and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Penn State University in 2012 and 2013 and continuously worked as a postdoctoral fellow advised by Professor Zi-Kui Liu till May 2016. Afterward he joined the school of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern Polytechnical University in 2016 as an Associate Professor and had been promoted to be a tenured Professor in 2022. Professor Wang's research topic is the Data-Driven ICME for Advanced Materials. He has authored and co-authored more than 100 publications in respectable peer-reviewed journals and applied more than 10 patents together with his collaborators. He is the Principle Editor of Journal of Materials Research, the Youth Committee Editor Board member of J Mag. Ally, J Mater Infor. etc. In 2024, he was selected one of the World’s Top 2% Scientists announced by Stanford/Elsevier.