Program

10:00 am

Aug 6

10:00 am



2 HR



Cecil Green Park House

Women in STEM Networking Breakfast

Meet fellow conference participants who self identify as women and learn about scientific career paths in academia and industry from female leaders in STEM over a delicious speed networking breakfast.

12:00 pm

Aug 6

12:00 pm



1 HR



The Nest, Lower Atrium

Break

Lunch and registration

Light lunch will be provided

12:45 pm

Aug 6

12:45 pm



2 HR



Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre, Jack Poole Hall

Workshop

Workshop: Democratizing self-driving labs (Part I)

To realize many of the benefits promised by an ‘accelerated’ materials research paradigm, a high degree of experimental automation is required. However, commercial automation solutions are typically prohibitively expensive and have a limited flexibility to extend to new experimental workflows. Low-cost, open-science approaches to automation afford researchers greater flexibility in establishing SDL workflows while lowering financial barriers to accessing these systems. This workshop will involve talks, discussion, and a hardware exhibition.

Organizers:

Tejs Vegge, Technical University of Denmark
Sterling Baird, Acceleration Consortium
Tonio Buonassisi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lilo Pozzo, University of Washington
Brenden Pelkie, University of Washington
Jason Hein, University of British Columbia
Milad Abolhasani, North Carolina State University
Curtis Berlinguette, University of British Columbia

12:45 pm

Aug 6

12:45 pm



1 HR



The Nest, Great Hall South

Workshop

Workshop: The essentials of scientific communication

Effective science communication is more crucial than ever. Scientific achievements lose their impact if not communicated clearly and engagingly. This workshop will teach you how to tailor your message for specific audiences, create visually appealing and informative figures and slides, and deliver dynamic and memorable presentations to a variety of public audiences.

Organizer:

Taylor Sparks, University of Utah

1:45 pm

Aug 6

1:45 pm



1 HR



The Nest, Great Hall South

Workshop

Workshop: World-class software: What is it? Do you need it? How do you get it?

One of the key pillars of automation and autonomous labs is the software that enables and manages their autonomy. In a rapidly evolving landscape with large-scale investments and diverse stakeholders, the quality of software can make or break the efficiency, efficacy, adaptability, and innovation potential of a lab. But what constitutes good, or even world-class, software? Is it just the advanced algorithms and high processing power exhibited by AI systems, or is there more to it? In this workshop, we will make the case that high-quality, if not world-class, software is indispensable for not decelerating the aspirations of the Acceleration Consortium. To that end, we will build an understanding of what makes software engineering challenging, the characteristics of high-quality software, when investments into software are justified, and the key elements of enabling high-quality software outputs from your lab. You don't need extremely expensive software engineers from Google to build world-class software, but what can we learn from how they achieve excellence?

Organizer:

Calvin Li, Fum

2:55 pm

Aug 6

2:55 pm



2 HR



Robert H. Lee Alumni Centre, Jack Poole Hall

Workshop

Workshop: Democratizing self-driving labs (Part II)

To realize many of the benefits promised by an ‘accelerated’ materials research paradigm, a high degree of experimental automation is required. However, commercial automation solutions are typically prohibitively expensive and have a limited flexibility to extend to new experimental workflows. Low-cost, open-science approaches to automation afford researchers greater flexibility in establishing SDL workflows while lowering financial barriers to accessing these systems. This workshop will involve talks, discussion, and a hardware exhibition.

‍

Organizers:

Tejs Vegge, Technical University of Denmark
Sterling Baird, Acceleration Consortium
Tonio Buonassisi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lilo Pozzo, University of Washington
Brenden Pelkie, University of Washington
Jason Hein, University of British Columbia
Milad Abolhasani, North Carolina State University
Curtis Berlinguette, University of British Columbia

2:55 pm

Aug 6

2:55 pm



2 HR



The Nest, Great Hall South

Workshop

Workshop: Advanced Bayesian Optimization Recipes for Real-World Applications with BayBE

Basic Bayesian optimization (BO) is a match made in heaven for the low- to no-data regime, a situation often encountered in real world industrial problems such as reaction screening, materials design or scale up. Rather than lay out the basics of BO, this workshop will focus on advanced techniques that boost BO performance and enable new use cases. Examples include i) transfer learning to combine data from similar but not identical campaigns; ii) slot-based mixture modeling to make use of advanced encodings for mixtures; iii) dynamic stopping of unpromising campaigns and iv) advanced categorical encodings. Techniques will be demonstrated using our open-source BO framework BayBE (https://github.com/emdgroup/baybe).

Organizer:

Martin Fitzner, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany

5:00 pm

Aug 6

5:00 pm



1 HR 30 M



The Nest, Great Hall South

Break

Poster Viewing Cocktail

Explore 100 posters and enjoy complimentary drinks and snacks

Explore poster titles and presenters online

Conference Schedule