What brings a social media company into materials science? In this episode, we talk with Larry Zitnick of Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) and Aaike van Vught from VSParticle about building OCx24, an open catalysis materials database. We discuss the challenges of creating an experimental database from scratch and how autonomous spark ablation devices made it possible. We cap things off with a discussion about how machine learning tools can leverage this database to help us discover new catalysts.

This episode of the Materialism Podcast is sponsored by Meta's Fundamental AI Research You can find more info about this project below: Blog post: https://ai.meta.com/blog/open-catalyst-simulations-experiments/ Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.11783 Dataset: https://fair-chem.github.io/core/datasets/ocx24.html

This Materialism Podcast is sponsored by Materials Today, an Elsevier community dedicated to the creation and sharing of materials science knowledge and experience through their peer-reviewed journals, academic conferences, educational webinars, and more

Thanks to Kolobyte and Alphabot for letting us use their music in the show!

If you have questions or feedback please send us emails at materialism.podcast@gmail.com or connect with us on social media: Instagram, Twitter.

Materialism Team: Taylor Sparks , Andrew Falkowski , & Jared Duffy .