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."

Comments

About damn time-A Joyous noise.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Lame name.

[Inoshiro]

"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).

Re:Lame name.

[haluness]

Very true - data mining is the new buzzword. The techniques used in data mining are prettyold and standard. Thats not to say that theres no research - theres a ton of stuff that can be done especially when handling large datasets. But fundamentally, it's well known statistical modeling - just rephrased for the 'Age of Marketing' :)

Modern generalized thinking

[w33t]

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.

Re:How useful is this?

[DerangedAlchemist]

No chemist will ever trust a computer result without doing the full lab work. This can still be incredibly useful.

Consider if each thorough test takes 6 months for 3000-4000 possibilities. If the computer can tell you the 5-10 compounds that are likely to work, in a few years you can have a product (or a PhD). Otherwise you were looking at nearly a thousand years before finding something.