Professor Markus Stricker is Junior Professor for Materials Informatics and Data Science. © RUB, Marquard

Material science The intuition of algorithms

When disciplines merge, they reveal fascinating connections. This is why education must become more interdisciplinary.

If digitalisation continues at the current rate, materials scientists will very soon gain a better understanding and boost the development of materials and processes, basing them on the intuition of algorithms in addition to their specialist knowledge and experience. But machine intuition does not emerge randomly.

It requires not only interdisciplinary research projects and working groups, but also a broad, interdisciplinary education such as the new Bachelor’s programme in Materials Science; here, subjects such as materials informatics combine algorithms from the field of computer science with knowledge about materials from the field of physics.

We are already seeing results of this disciplinary fusion, as materials are better described at the atomic level, alloys are developed at a faster rate and experimental results are automatically evaluated. I am looking forward to an exciting development and I am curious to see which surprising unknown connections will reveal themselves to us in the future.

About the person

Markus Stricker studied mechanical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe between 2006 and 2012, where he subsequently also received his PhD, now at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), in 2017. He initially remained at KIT as a postdoctoral fellow until he moved to the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland in 2018. Since 2020, he has held the junior professorship in Materials Informatics and Data Science at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Materials Simulation, Icams for short, at RUB.

Professorships in digitization research

Published

Thursday
21 January 2021
8:44 am

By

Markus Stricker

Translated by

Donata Zuber

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