My friends, we soon look forward to hosting you at the University of Toronto for the second annual Accelerate Conference!
For those of you who joined us last year, you will remember the inaugural conference as an amazing experience. Four days of inspiring plenary talks, boundary pushing invited speakers, and a memorable salsa night that brought together a vibrant international community dedicated to the emerging field of materials acceleration.
It is good that we started laying those bricks when we did because our climate and energy issues have not diminished in number or severity since we last met. As I write this, the forest fires in Northern Canada continue to burn, spewing toxic gases and ash down on all North America. Geopolitical conflicts threaten energy stability in the western world and mass famine in the most vulnerable communities. Now is not the time for science as usual!
I hope that you will walk away at the end of the week inspired by what you have seen and heard and that you carry this momentum home to your labs and institutions.
Fortunately, we are better equipped than ever to face these challenges. In the past year, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a tool that can allow us to interact and interrogate the literature, our data, instruments, and models with natural language. There are even the first hints of LLM-boosted reasoning and direct model generation. Meanwhile, this past year, our community has begun feverishly building on the foundation laid last year with the announcement of major research centres focused on self-driving labs to accelerate the discovery of new materials and molecules that we desperately need to build a better, safer, and more sustainable future. This includes the Acceleration Consortium’s $500 million program to design one of the world’s first self-driving lab user facility, which will push the boundaries of this autonomous technology while also promoting equity and open science practices across a wide range of materials disciplines.
At the conference, I know that you will feel the energy in the air as you participate in sessions and engage with old and new friends in the hallways. I hope that you will walk away at the end of the week inspired by what you have seen and heard and that you carry this momentum home to your labs and institutions. The time to act is now and through working together we can change the world for the better.
– Jason Hattrick-Simpers, Scientific Committee Chair, Accelerate Conference 2023