Information is everywhere

Abstract

The saying “information is everywhere” is not just true of the real world, but also applicable to materials science. The field encompassed by the term “information” spreads across multiple disciplines, from physical science to technology and industrial manufacturing. In order to implement the new scope of our journal, we invite scientists in a wide range of research disciplines to communicate their findings and insightful opinions on our high‐quality platform.

Information is relevant to knowledge communicated or received concerning a particular fact or circumstance, while materials science is an interdisciplinary field studying the connection between materials structure, properties, processing methods, and their performance in numerous practical applications. The rapid development of novel materials with unique electrical, optical, and magnetic properties is a cornerstone in the broad and diverse field of information technology (Figure 1). InfoMat has emerged as a prominent journal of choice for researchers working in materials science and information technology to communicate their scientific and technical opinions. Since its launch, InfoMat has enjoyed an ever-increasing flow of excellent manuscripts and very positive responses from the scientific community. We are also witnessing a growing interest in innovative interdisciplinary research from all branches of science and engineering beyond traditional information technology. Therefore, the concept of “information” driven by data science and artificial intelligence has been becoming increasingly important since the rich variety of knowledge integrated from datasets cannot be understood within a single discipline.

FIGURE 1. The diagram of information technology in materials science

The saying “information is everywhere” is not just true of the real world, but also applicable to materials science, as it is essentially built on data containing information and theories that explain itself. Benefiting from advanced materials synthesis and characterization techniques, material scientists generate tremendous quantities of data through experiments: structural phases and chemical composition, functional properties (e.g. electronic, optical, magnetic, and mechanical), synthesis and processing conditions, fundamental thermochemical information, etc. Apart from experimental research, high-throughput generation and analysis of computational materials data have become common practice owing to massively parallel computing architectures over the last decade. With a basic understanding of the information's origins, we can select or design materials for a variety of applications, including electronics, photonics, telecommunications, aerospace, nuclear power, information processing, and energy technology. Benefiting from the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence in the last decade, one can begin to develop patterns in the classification of materials behavior by integrating phenomenological relationships of discrete data on specific material characteristics. Effectively understanding and interpreting the information could reduce the typical 10–20 years research, development, and commercialization cycle for materials discovery. Novel information technology devices, such as strain-gated transistors, ferroelectric memristors, and neuromorphic vision sensors, could be conceived and further developed more efficiently by automatically searching materials with appropriate properties.

In order to encourage innovative and impactful interdisciplinary research, great efforts have been made to expand the current scope of traditional information technology to a broader spectrum of science or engineering disciplines related to materials innovation concerning information. The field encompassed by the term “information” spreads across multiple disciplines, from physical science to technology and industrial manufacturing. We especially welcome research works on novel materials design concerning various physical, chemical, electrochemical, and biological processes. Taking catalysis reaction as an example, the relevant research activity is traditionally considered as under the scope of energy research. However, an in-depth analysis of the electron transfer mechanism provides key information about the fundamentals of the catalytic activity. No doubt that such information greatly helps researchers design high-performance catalysts for future technological applications. A further example typically covered by our expanded scope is novel materials designed for the bio-sensing application, which renders the accumulation of information through biochemical signals generated on the analyte of interest. Nanotechnology has attracted much attention for its capability in designing and developing biosensors in the past decades. Nanomaterials have been proven to selectively conjugate and respond to specific analytes with high sensitivity through surface functionalization.

To implement the new scope of our journal, we invite scientists in a wide range of research disciplines to communicate their findings and insightful opinions on our high-quality platform. With our innovation, we will continue to bring exciting and novel research work in all areas of materials science to the attention of the scientific community.