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Data Mining Used to Create New Materials
Roland Piquepaille writes "MIT researchers have successfully integrated data mining tools and modern methods of quantum mechanics. They've designed software which can help predict the crystal structures of materials. To simplify, they say they've used methods used by online sales sites to suggest books to customers. And it seems to work: they claim they can determine in days the properties of atomic structures that might have taken months before. Read more for additional references and pictures."
Maybe now I can get that Vorpal Mace of Undying +3 in the same time that I could only get the +1 model before. This will reduce the time I spend level grinding and farming in the MMORPGs that I frequent. Finally, a technology I can use.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
"its about time someone did something worthwhile with datamining ... i'm so sick of everything datamining is used for being big brother/1984 related."
That's just because the cynic grabs all the attention. Datamining has been used for years, by the fortune 500, and you don't hear much about that.
Considering how broadly software patents are worded now a days, I would not be surprised if MIT gets sued by Amazon for patent infringement.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Netcrafts confirms--Roland Piquepaille is dying!
Oh J.S. Christ. For a forum of geeks you all know diddly squat about law. A software patent isn't the same as a business patent. Second you can't patent math.
"Using a technique called data mining, the MIT team preloaded the entire body of historical knowledge of crystal structures into a computer algorithm, or program, which they had designed to make correlations among the data based on the underlying rules of physics.
Harnessing this knowledge, the program then delivers a list of possible crystal structures for any mixture of elements whose structure is unknown. The team can then run that list of possibilities through a second algorithm that uses quantum mechanics to calculate precisely which structure is the most stable energetically -- a standard technique in the computer modeling of materials. "
Transparent aluminum anyone ?
There are two surprisingly simple and "dumb" principles that exist in our world.
The first is called evolution (random mutation, breeding of the fittest) the result of which is basically everything around us, and it has resurfaced in computer programming as genetic programming, which essentially uses random processes and selection to create new inventions, mechanisms and even intelligent virtual creatures.
The second I'll call "intelligent observation". It's basically how animals and people learn everything they know, by observing and applying "what seems to make sense" in other areas of our lives, even without understanding the underlying mechanisms (and how we discovered fire, or tools by observing similar nature mechanisms/animals). This has resurfaced in computer programming as data mining.
Data mining and genetic programming: these two beat any patent, any existing algorithm, because they are not crippled by our limited brain capacity to understand the world around us. Expect a lot more of both in computer science and our lives in the following years.
This sounds a bit like Computer Learning/ AI to me. Give it a zillion past cases to learn from and then let it predict the next one. I did some things along those lines in my AI class for machine problems (perceptron comes to mind), though not nearly as complicated. That was a fun CS class.
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No more freaking Roland Piquepalle!
This guy is way out there
"The second I'll call "intelligent observation"."
You know, most people would call it statistics (in this example, using a mathematical model to predict results), or the scientific method (in general, observing repeatable events).
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I welcome our cyrstalline entity overlords. Oh, wait, they were killed off in season five.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Anyway, it'd be interesting to see what we can do with this new form of technology...ice-nine is, of course, only meant as a bit of satire, but it suggests some interesting ideas about the structure of our universe.
The heavens do not fall for such a trifle.
I mean, regression to match candidates against an existing body of data, we have dating web sites which do that these days. Nice way of quickly sorting the candidates but Nature material?
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- transparent aluminum [Add to Cart]
- broad spectrum LEDs [Add to Cart]
- efficient peltier effect alloys [Add to Cart]
- 3D holographic memory array crystals [Add to Cart]
NOW How Much Would You Pay? (TM)If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Last time I checked, Engineers look for the easiest reliable method for finding a solution. Why are the MIT folks complicating this?
I have them beat. I can find the properties of atomic structures, that took months to solve before, in seconds.
How?
Google. Why reinvent the wheel when the work has already been done?
(I know, I know, that's not what they meant, but the submitter left it open for witty comments).
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Then hopefully they'll have a better success rate at suggesting new materials than the recommendations of crap I keep getting from Amazon.
No Amazon, I'm not interested in season 6 of DS9... nor season 2... nor season 5... nor season 3... nor the entire series! And don't you dare think about suggesting Desperate Housewives to me again!
Clean Environment. Good jobs. Dream On.
e.g.
http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/
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It's true. Zonk gets paid by Roland to post his articles. This has been going on for years now, and it disgusts me to the bone.
but, but ad-aware deletes mine!
Why not feed a computer all the existing expired patents, and see what it comes up with? It's not even 'skilled in the art' so any result is so patently (yeah) obvious that it ought to be unpatentable...
Pity you'd get sued out of existence in a heartbeat, though.
ac
... I worked on it when I was employed by Eastman Kodak back in 2000. We had/have any number of sophisticated ways of modeling parameters based upon previous research- but it wasn't called data mining.
One of the companies that has supplied hardware (or is known in the industry to do so) is PQS- http://www.pqs-chem.com/. They 'sell' hardware and software, but their software is pretty darn slick for setting up large jobs.
Since I did mostly dye research, I'm supposing the big difference is these are more interested in metalic properties than what we were- light, colour, mp, etc- all things that might be useful for film or OLEDs.
But still, if it's getting positive press, maybe it's time to put it back on the resume...
That's the funniest variation I've seen in a long time.
Metals with this spectral reading also had:
-face-centered cubic structure
-high melting point[CLICK HERE TO LEARN ABOUT SUPER SAVER SHIPPING ON LASERS!]
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Yeah. Datamining killed my whole family and gave my dog the runs.
It's the most destructive thing since the PATRIOT ACT, which wiped out most of the population of the Pacific Northwest and caused the birds in my area to sing an octave higher.
Reading about how a program can find something that a human could not, or would not, brings to mind a notion I had the other day.
I am learning Java (and OO programming best practices in general), and am pretty heavily into it at this point. I was tooling along, writing some code to test some aspects of the language when I suddenly realized that much of what I was typing I was kind of unaware of.
When I had first begun studying in earnest a few months ago I remember how closely I paid attention to the smallest syntactical details. But now that much of this has become wrote I found myself automatically just cruising through - not really conceptualizing what I was doing. But it was still working.
I went back into my little code and delved into a deeper reading of what I had written. It was all correct according to theory - and I could recall all the little subtleties of how Java's VM was interpreting this and that - but while I was writing it I was giving no thought to it. It just happened; it just came out of me.
Now, hearing about these programs that can mine data and find things that human eyes would miss - and relatedly hearing about machines that can invent - I wonder if one day invention, discovery and the like will all be wrote.
I wonder if, like my mindless coding moment, things will just happen - research will just occur - without really a second thought of the "low-level" processes that currently are held so dear.
It's interesting. It might be akin to mathematics in some ways - wherein you can generalize a large body of calculation and come to a conclusion without actually outputting the raw numerical form.
It is an approximation, yes. But with some work the approximation can be decomposed into elementary school level math expressions - if you really want to go through all that work.
But why decompose it, it works fine generalized (much better for humans in fact).
It's interesting to me - this modern high-level generalization.
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
We get the characteristics of all the past politicians we liked (& hated) and plug them in and then compare them against "Our Boy".
I just suspect we are not going like the megalomaniacal persons we will elect any better than the ones we have, but it will be interesting, because I can guarantee someone will or is doing it.
Moving RP from /. to digg would improve the quality of both.
The Bush Administration uses data mining to create presidential powers out of whole cloth.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
What IS the world coming to?
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ZOMG! Don't let Lex Luthor get his hands on this technology! He will try to sell real estate on a crystal island after killing billions of people who had all the money to buy his real estate!
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This approach has been popular for quite some time now. For example, there is a research group at CAESAR in Bonn, Germany, called Combinatorial Material Science that has been doing something similar for the last five years or so in the field of material science, especially regarding thin films.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
Does determining the structure without any doubt still require the full time consuming lab analysis, or can you easily verify the candidate structure found with the data mining approach?
... not.
But I did work on a project that applied data mining techniques to drug screening problems. Specifically, we used kernels on molecule data in a support vector machine to predict the outcome of AIDS and cancer screening data. It worked moderately well. (AUC of up to .94)
So: Surprise, surprise, data mining is used for all kinds of things! Drug screening, materials engineering, process control, analyzing NMR spectra, ... it's not just marketing! Basically, every application that produces a lot of data will eventually have data mining people flock to it, trying to data mine the heck out of it.
Regards, Sebastian
That sounds completely absurd with water, but that is pretty much the idea of how prion diseases like mad cow are supposed to work. The misfolded protein gets normal proteins to refold like itself.
as salaam alinkinuum
That is some thinkiin'
Aluminum Oxynitride.
Uhm, how could it cause the birds to singe an octave higher?
- These characters were randomly selected.
Uhm, how could it cause the birds to singe an octave higher?
Helium.
... who has never actually used genetic programming. Genetic programming doesn't create new inventions -- it typically tweaks parameters in an existing invention so that the output of the invention approaches a goal. For example, you could use it dynamically weigh, say, SpamAssassin test scores. It doesn't just magically evolve new tests, and it certainly doesn't evolve a regular-expression based server side spam filter, it just tweaks the efficiency of one which already exists. Even for artifically restricted problem domains, such as CoreWars or similar combative programming environments, the successful A-life programs generally revolve around optimizing a strategy and a base implementation which a human came up with. Call it "intelligent design", because thats what it is :)
They also most certainly do not beat all existing algorithms. In some problem domains they work very well. In others (hmm, lets see: sort, calendar applications, Internet telephony, uncountably many fields of human endeavor) they're wholly 100% inapplicable.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Someday these advanced algorithms might will even help with the most daunting task of all: choosing a Linux distribution.
/. post misleading? They are only predicting crystalline structures, not actually creating the materials right? How do they actually go about creating the theoretical materials?
But in all seriousness, is it me, or is the subject header for the
The two questions are: "given a particular chemical composition, what is the crystal structure? what are its likely properties?"
The scientists have a database of known crystal structures (plus some unspecified physics). Step 1 is to use 'datamining' techniques to generate a shortlist of possible structures for a given composition based on the database. Step 2 they perform quantum mechanical calculations to decide the likely properties (eg band gap).
I assume as step 3 they then investigate in more detail any materials which show signs of being interesting or matching the properties they are seeking. The methodology of steps 1-2 is necessarily guesswork not a definite answer. Nevertheless, for some time materials scientists, chemists and others have realised that there are very substantial benefits to narrowing down the possibilities before doing more in depth work.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
I agree, leave it to MIT to keep it out of the hands of men with small penises, and in dire need of extension or hardening technology.
I think this technology, and similar future software will be incredibly instrumental in building that futuristic world we like to depict in Sci-Fi shows; everything from doors that seal completely, to intelligent materials that can be reused or reconfigured over and over again for many purposes.
Maybe even materials that are more lossless when it comes to recycling....
Right. Keeping track of all the knowledge in natural science is as hard an as important as the science itself.
It is no wonder we have groups working on datamining at the bioinformatics department at my university.
I hope they're doing better than the Amazon recommendations -- or any other auto-may-I-suggest software. I see nothing there but the endless (and I mean endless) repetition of key words from the titles.
Please!! I beg you!! Just click on the fucking link a few times. That's all I ask. You don't even have to read it if you don't want to. My popularity is waning, and I'm almost done for. For the sake of Christ, can you please just help a chap out and click a few times?
Thanks,
Roland Picklepacker
RTFM or in this case RTFA. Mod this fool down.
If I understand this correctly:
Select theoretical material.
Determine subset of likely configurations.
Run simulator to determine physical properties of new material for each likely configuration.
Running this process against a large set of theoretical materials and saving those results into a database and allowing data mining on those results would allow materials scientists to perhaps cherry pick their next effort or research direction. Highest tensile strength material with low specific weight? Or some such thing, not to be specific but if the list returned could be then produced in a lab and verified, that would be pretty useful.
It might even lead the discovery of 'unnatural' material configurations. For example, taking a known material and forcing the simulator to run against contrived or non-optimal configurations might yield interesting and perhaps highly desirable results.
The question, then, is whether this wonderful data mining will be used to identify corrupt or incompetant managers, politicians etc., as well as troublesome underlings.
Revive the Constitution.