The Second Decade of the Materials Genome Initiative

Two years ago, the US Materials Genome Initiative (MGI) released an updated strategic plan that outlined the priorities and tactics for this multi-agency effort to accelerate the discovery, design, development, and deployment of new materials into manufactured products. The means to achieve this overarching goal is the Materials Innovation Infrastructure, a federated, yet tightly knit, interplay of computational, experimental and data resources. In this presentation I will briefly review the MGI's progress to date and explore the new strategic plan, especially its focus on data and artificial intelligence. I will then focus the remainder of the talk exploring the variety of social, technical, and intellectual challenges that have both made the MGI an ambitious and exciting undertaking as well as providing a number of sobering lessons in the reluctance of the R&D community to adopt paradigm shifts.