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Ben Blaiszik

@benblaiszik

Group Leader - AI and data infrastructure for science at UChicago/Argonne/Globus - UofIllinois alum. materials, chemistry, physics. Opinions are my own.๐Ÿค–๐Ÿ”ฌ

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Latest posts by Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik

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a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue out and says `` wait ! what ?? '' . ALT: a black and white dog is sitting on a couch with its tongue out and says `` wait ! what ?? '' .

92 is wild this early. Here in the last week weโ€™ve had 71 F, tornados, baseball sized hail, then snow and maybe 9 inches more snow this weekend? What is this??

13.03.2026 00:58 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Thank you Geoff! We should touch base sometime. I wonder if there are connections to be made between our model publishing efforts, TorchSim GPU MLIP software, and unique datasets (e.g., OMol25 we have millions of wave functions on hand), and more. Cheers!

10.03.2026 17:51 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Almost certainly every paper will be touched by AI/ML tools and the associated software stack in the not too distant future. That's just the way these technologies diffuse.

10.03.2026 17:48 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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GitHub - blaiszik/ml_publication_charts Contribute to blaiszik/ml_publication_charts development by creating an account on GitHub.

If youโ€™d like to reuse or remix the figures for talks, papers, or slides, everything is available here: github.com/blaiszik/ml_...

10.03.2026 17:03 ๐Ÿ‘ 2 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

To make the data easier to reuse, the repository includes:
+ Raw data queries, and data in csv format
+ Notebooks used to generate the plots
+ Both normalized and raw publication charts

10.03.2026 17:03 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

This is quite a long-term trend as well. Across these fields, 5-year compound growth rates remain extremely high (Materials: 37.3%, Chemistry: 28.3%, Physics 27.9%) suggesting that the integration of machine learning into core scientific workflows is still accelerating.

10.03.2026 17:03 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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Updated AI/ML publication charts to include data from 2025! After what looked like an approaching S-curve top in 2024, the 2025 growth looks more bullish.

In 2025, Web of Science data shows:
๐Ÿ”ธ Materials: 12,987 papers +36.9% YOY
๐Ÿ”น Chemistry: 16,522 papers +40.8%
๐Ÿ”ธ Physics: 11,955 papers +27.5%

10.03.2026 17:03 ๐Ÿ‘ 4 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 3 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Over the next month, we'll be releasing major updates to the Materials Data Facility! We will maintain support for all previous features, but there will be a lot of new ones. What are critical aspects you would like to see in a modern data repository?

If you're interested in testing, send me a DM!

05.03.2026 18:05 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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What if We Just Built It All? A Call to Action to Reimagine Scientific Software in the Age of LLMs Scientific software is the invisible infrastructure of modern research, and it's been starved of software engineering resources for decades. With LLMs and coding agents, that's changing.

Cloudflare rebuilt Next.js in a week with AI for $1,100. I wrote about how this could become a defining moment for the scientific community to erase decades of tech debt and build the software tools that we have imagined, to accelerate progress. Let's go!

www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-w...

26.02.2026 18:11 ๐Ÿ‘ 3 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

I was looking at my dissertation defense slides recently and was fondly like... "Wow, this is what it's like to focus on one project a year."

12.02.2026 21:31 ๐Ÿ‘ 2 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
2026 MaRDA Annual Meeting โ€“ Marda

The second panel will feature researchers from industry including Santiago Miret (Lila), Abhijeet Gangan (Periodic), Lily Kim (Microsoft Discovery), and Tim Erdmann (IBM)

More details on the panel here, with registration: www.marda-alliance.org/2026-marda-a...

12.02.2026 21:22 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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The Materials Research Data Alliance meeting is next week! Great panelists and opportunity for connection. Registration is free, and content is available online worldwide.

Sign up to hear from key speakers: James Warren (NIST), John Schlueter (NSF), Andrew Schwartz (DOE), and Sean Donegan (AFRL)

12.02.2026 21:22 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
Feng @ GT

Portfolio: fengzhihao77.github.io

03.02.2026 18:24 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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If your team works on ML for materials/molecular discovery and needs someone who has built physics-informed networks for real problems, check out Zhihao Feng. Genuine problem-solver, strong collaborator, adaptable. Here's an example of his work.

Link: www.linkedin.com/posts/fengzh...

03.02.2026 18:23 ๐Ÿ‘ 4 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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a cartoon of spider-man fighting another spider-man in front of a nypd truck ALT: a cartoon of spider-man fighting another spider-man in front of a nypd truck
22.01.2026 22:32 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

What are the biggest software-solvable problems holding you back in your research?

e.g.,
- There's no Python package to convert formats between X and Y
- Running tasks on HPC systems requires expertise I don't have
- Formatting or tracking the references for my paper is annoying

22.01.2026 22:26 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 2 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

As a kid, I was outdoors and in the woods all the time. The pandemic reminded me how awesome outside is. I still do as many meetings as possible on walks.

06.01.2026 03:23 ๐Ÿ‘ 3 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

or you'll just publish...much more. ๐Ÿ˜…

"If I had a million dollars
We wouldn't have to eat Kraft Dinner
But we would eat Kraft Dinner
Of course we would, we'd just eat more"

05.01.2026 21:20 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

The 29th is a typo on the final day, it is in fact the 19th :)

05.01.2026 19:17 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

There will also be opportunities to connect with others interested in these topics through poster sessions and a community Slack.

The event is online, so available around the world. Full speaker list soon!

05.01.2026 19:17 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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The 4th Materials Research Data Alliance meeting is set for Feb 17-19 on topics in materials + data + AI. This is a great opportunity to hear from speakers from academia, national labs, and industry.

Register now (free - online): marda-alliance.org/2026-marda-a...

05.01.2026 19:17 ๐Ÿ‘ 1 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

I'm excited to help improve our understanding of catalysis and fusion materials via the Integrated Scientific Agentic AI for Catalysis (ISAAC) and CascAIde projects; and to see Rick Stevens and @ianfoster leading ModCon to develop/collect the models/data needed to advance science. Stay tuned!

12.12.2025 18:17 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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DOE announces $320M in new investments in the AI4Science!

You can read more about the Genesis Mission, the American Science Cloud, the Transformational AI Models Consortium (ModCon), along with 51 AI in science application projects here and in the attached image.

๐Ÿ”— energy.gov/articles/ene...

12.12.2025 18:17 ๐Ÿ‘ 2 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Amazing week of results from AI4Science with NeurIPS and MRS. But, for those who couldn't make it, post a link to your research here we can boost you too!

08.12.2025 20:54 ๐Ÿ‘ 4 ๐Ÿ” 2 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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I saved this image from Stable Diffusion in Dec 2022 because it was amazing a model could output such detail. ๐Ÿ˜…

30.11.2025 17:14 ๐Ÿ‘ 5 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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Release v0.4.1 ยท TorchSim/torch-sim Thank you to everyone who contributed to this release! This release includes important bug fixes, new features, and API improvements. @thomasloux, @curtischong, @CompRhys, @orionarcher, @WillEngler...

Full details and package here. github.com/TorchSim/tor...

Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2508.06628

24.11.2025 18:07 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

Thanks to the 10 contributors! Thomas Loux, Curtis Chong, Rhys Goodall, Orion Archer Cohen, Will Engler, Abhijeet Gangan, Andrew_S_Rosen and others

Bonus, a fun NanoBanana interpretation of the TorchSim paper

24.11.2025 18:07 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0

New features include mixed periodic boundary condition (PBC) support, NVT Nose Hoover method, and more. This release also enables important integrations with QUACC and Atomate2 to proceed. More on that soon!

24.11.2025 18:07 ๐Ÿ‘ 0 ๐Ÿ” 0 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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TorchSim continues its growth aiming to be the high-performance engine for MLIP-powered atomistic simulation.

With this release (4.1), there improvements across the entire stack with new features, bug fixes, and improved documentation.

24.11.2025 18:07 ๐Ÿ‘ 6 ๐Ÿ” 2 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 1 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0
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So your data are available upon reasonable request? Well, we are making some reasonable requests - at scale. :)

1. Search literature (currently stubbed)
2. Enumerate papers, extract contacts
3. Send email w/ data drop location
4. Parse data

Does anyone want to help productionize this?

21.11.2025 21:32 ๐Ÿ‘ 5 ๐Ÿ” 1 ๐Ÿ’ฌ 0 ๐Ÿ“Œ 0