The International Materials Institute (IMI) for Materials Informatics & Combinatorial Materials Science, which is based at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is a joint effort with the University of Maryland and Florida International University (the largest Hispanic Serving Institution in the US). This International Materials Institute (IMI) will pursue two broad goals: i) enabling global access, sharing, and utilization of materials information and knowledge to solve critical problems; and ii) demonstrating and promoting new methods (combinatorial experimentation, informatics, modeling and databases)which dramatically enhance the performance of materials engineering locally and internationally. In addition, the IMI is in a unique position to meaningfully promote diversity in higher education at a national level and to provide a significant opportunity for the IMI to showcase the diversity of the American scientific community at the international level. The Institute will be initiated with a consortium of laboratories that are world leaders in materials science databases and combinatorial methodologies in materials science, representing ten countries spread across Europe, Japan, the Middle East, and the Americas.
The IMI will foster and coordinate collaborations on materials issues, which strongly impact on technological progress and economic growth from globalization in fields such as information storage and energy technologies. Illustrative examples include new chemistries for novel magnetic materials and combinatorial process design for functional and structural ceramics. These activities will be carried out as international collaboration platforms that advance the informatics/combinatorial methodology. The research themes will serve as platforms for enhancing the scope of informatics and combinatorial methods as well as serving to address materials related technologies that address pressing global social and economic concerns. To ensure the integration of research and education the IMI will interface the research efforts directly into an accessible information network that will serve as the information technology vehicle for education and information dissemination as part of an international materials network. The IMI will also serve as the hub for this information network, providing ready access through a web-based portal to support the training of a new scientific workforce well versed in the skills of both the materials sciences and the information sciences. A collaboratory infrastructure will be built around the networking capabilities of INTERNET 2 so as to take advantage of the backbone of the next generation of the information highway. To further promote the integration of research and education, an avenue will be provided for the international materials community to effectively use an array of digital libraries, databases, experimental facilities and computational expertise distributed in laboratories around the world. Within this infrastructure, educational vehicles to exploit this rich IT environment will be built to deliver real time access to remote instrumentation, multimedia links between classrooms and laboratories, and simulation-based electronic learning systems which convey the concepts and benefits of combinatorial experimentation and materials informatics.
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The International Materials Institute (IMI) will introduce this new paradigm of research and education into the materials sciences, addressing important materials needs in the fields of energy, environment and communications. The synergism between informatics and combinatorial experimentation provides the key for accelerated development of materials science from "atoms to applications". The work of the IMI will also involve the development and integration of ultra large-scale databases and digital libraries in conjunction with new technologies permitting highly efficient and rapid experimentation. The Institute will exploit international materials collaborations through the use of information technology in order to rapidly develop and discover solutions to critical materials technologies relevant to global economic concerns. By selectively working on topical materials science themes of global interest and interfacing them into an accessible information network, the IMI will serve as the hub for an internet-based international materials network. An international educational infrastructure that is readily accessible through a web-based portal will be established to support the training of a new scientific workforce well versed in the skills of both the materials sciences and the information sciences. INTERNET 2 will serve as the physical infrastructure on which the IMI will build the International Materials Information Highway.
