Advancing Visual Computing in Materials Science (Shonan Seminar 189)

TL;DR

This paper discusses the evolving role of visual computing in materials science, highlighting recent advances, challenges, and interdisciplinary collaborations to enhance understanding and discovery of complex materials.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent developments and emerging challenges in applying visual computing techniques to materials science research.

Findings

Integration of machine learning and immersive analytics in materials science

Emerging challenges in uncertainty and ensemble analysis

Strengthening interdisciplinary collaboration between visual computing and materials science

Abstract

Materials science has a significant impact on society and its quality of life, e.g., through the development of safer, more durable, more economical, environmentally friendly, and sustainable materials. Visual computing in materials science integrates computer science disciplines from image processing, visualization, computer graphics, pattern recognition, computer vision, virtual and augmented reality, machine learning, to human-computer interaction, to support the acquisition, analysis, and synthesis of (visual) materials science data with computer resources. Therefore, visual computing may provide fundamentally new insights into materials science problems by facilitating the understanding, discovery, design, and usage of complex material systems. This seminar is considered as a follow-up of the Dagstuhl Seminar 19151 Visual Computing in Materials Sciences, held in April 2019. Since then, the field has kept evolving and many novel challenges have emerged, with regard to more traditional topics in visual computing, such as topology analysis or image processing and analysis, to recently emerging topics, such as uncertainty and ensemble analysis, and to the integration of new research disciplines and exploratory technologies, such machine learning and immersive analytics. With the current seminar, we target to strengthen and extend the collaboration between the domains of visual computing and materials science (and across visual computing disciplines), by foreseeing challenges and identifying novel directions of interdisciplinary work. We brought visual computing and visualization experts from academia, research centers, and industry together with domain experts, to uncover the overlaps of visual computing and materials science and to discover yet-unsolved challenges, on which we can collaborate to achieve a higher societal impact.