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I'm curious if you're aware of the Materials Genome Initiative. It's a group of materials scientists in the US who are very sympathetic to these problems and wa

I'm curious if you're aware of the Materials Genome Initiative. It's a group of materials scientists in the US who are very sympathetic to these problems and want to build out infrastructure for big data analysis of materials. We're based mostly at NIST, where most of the huge datasets are generated or stored.

roel_v 9y ago
No never heard of this - I work in very different fields though. There are initiatives enough left and right, but they're mostly bottom-up, with the majority fizzling out after the one or two persons driving up get other positions or different types of projects. Which is a chicken and egg problem; many people don't want to risk their projects on something they have no control of and might collapse as they've seen happen often to others. Maybe I'm just cynical having been through a few cycles of this, it would be great if someone did succeed. I just don't see the incentives. Quality in software engineering is a hobby interest, it's not vital to the success of research, or of a researcher. I know this causes a major cognitive dissonance shock to those who are heavily software-focused like most on this site; and of course it did the same to me, for many years even. I guess I've evolve along the lines of most humanitarian aid workers. You start out thinking you'll fix this once and for all in the next year or two, and 20 years later you find yourself being quite happy that you managed to make some difference to a village of a few families.