iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

The LLM Hackathon for Applications in Materials and Chemistry is now the Open Scientific Intelligence Hackathon, and our next event will be Oct 21–22, 2026! 🗓️ Oct 21–22 📍 Hybrid, online, in-person sites TBA As always, the event is free, hybrid, and worldwide. Register here llmhackathon.github.io

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 13/04/2026

Remember back when the NSF Graduate Fellowships were announced and there would be a solid week of the students posting about their great work? 🥲 Congrats to all the new fellows! www.nsf.gov/news/nsf-ann...

nsf.gov

NSF announces 2026 Graduate Research Fellowship Program award offers

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced that it has made offers and will award 2,500 Graduate Research Fellowships for the 2026-2027 academic year...

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

Do you use machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) on HPC clusters? Do you have a graveyard of condo environments to manage their incompatible dependencies? If so, we should talk. We built Rootstock to make it trivial to swap MLIPs when running atomistic simulation jobs with ASE/LAMMPS.

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Reposted by Ben Blaiszik

Geoff Hutchison @geoffhutchison.net · 14/03/2026

There are already great translations into Hungarian, Indonesian, Romanian, Tamil, Ukrainian ... We could use more help with Chinese, German, Hindi, Japanese & Portuguese #chemsky

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 10/03/2026

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: 🔸 Materials: 12,987 papers +36.9% YOY 🔹 Chemistry: 16,522 papers +40.8% 🔸 Physics: 11,955 papers +27.5%

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

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!

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 26/02/2026

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...

linkedin.com

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.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

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)

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

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...

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

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

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 05/01/2026

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...

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

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. 🔗 energy.gov/articles/ene...

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 08/12/2025

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!

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

I saved this image from Stable Diffusion in Dec 2022 because it was amazing a model could output such detail. 😅

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 24/11/2025

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.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

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?

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Yesterday I did a glow-up of the entire Materials Data Facility front end using Gemini 3 in less than 2 hours. A few things I learned followed by few snapshots of the updates. What did I learn? 1. Gemini 3 feels clearly ahead in terms of front-end design. Less AI slop, and more focus.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 12/11/2025

Northern Lights over the western Chicago suburbs at 9:15. Clearly visible by eye, lasted about 10 mins. 🤩

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 01/11/2025

Did a quick experiment last night to see how far kids run on Halloween by giving my son a phone. The answer was 5.3 miles.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

🔥We're excited to announce a major milestone for the machine-learned interatomic potential (MLIP) ecosystem: TorchSim is moving to community ownership and governance through a partnership with Radical AI and the open-source community! TorchSim is an atomistic simulation engine built for the AI era.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Generative AI is changing how we discover materials, but without direction, it can quickly lose its way. Marcus Schwarting led an effort to show that using active learning as a guide helps to prioritize the best candidates in scientific discovery workflows for MOFs.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

Are you looking for ~120~ examples of how LLMs can be used to advance research in materials science & chemistry with open code? We've made a quick search interface for you to explore projects from the recent hackathon. See the projects here and come join our community: llmhackathon.github.io

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

🔥 Today we announce the Meta OMol25 Electronic Structures Dataset - 500 TB of molecular data in collaboration with the AI at Meta team. Access Details: github.com/facebookrese...

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Going to be honest. Apple’s Liquid Glass and ios26 styling feels cheap and cluttered. Also why would I want to see so much visually distorted content (under glass)? Some interesting concepts, but needs a lot of work.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

Over 1100 people around the world, virtual and in-person, decided to take a chance together, to imagine, and build - seeking ways to speed discovery and understanding in materials and chemistry with AI. We'll share our findings soon, but from what I've heard already prepare to be amazed.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

My feed has gotten stale. Who is posting top tier science content?

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

Imagine researchers being able to: + Move data effortlessly across systems + Launch simulations on Exascale HPC systems + Run AI models via Garden & Galaxy All via user or agent intent/language to make the next breakthroughs in energy, materials, and chemistry.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

A conversation with Magdalena Lederbauer, prize winner from our LLM hackathon last year, and rising star in AI for science. She discusses GlossaGen, a project to automate glossary building and connecting terms into networks across papers, her background and story. Video: youtu.be/9Gr4VrEKD4Q

youtu.be

Breaking Down Barriers in Science: AI Tools for Better Research Communication

YouTube video by Ben Blaiszik

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

🚀 We asked: What if the time to set up and run the best Machine-Learned Interatomic Potentials (MLIPs) took seconds, not days? Today, we release the MLIP Garden v0.1. What you can do now: - Experiment ~instantly - Scale deployments on experimental NSF and Dept of Energy systems

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 19/08/2025

If you are looking for a great place to meet collaborators across scientific domains and grow your career in AI, quantum, manufacturing, and more, consider applying for an Argonne Fellowship! A similar program helped me transition to data and AI research. Link: www.anl.gov/hr/ldrd-name...

anl.gov

Argonne LDRD Named Fellowships

Apply by October 1, 2025 for Argonne Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Named Fellowships honoring Dr. Maria Goeppert Mayer and Dr. Walter Massey.

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Reposted by Ben Blaiszik

Ry Nduma @rynduma.bsky.social · 18/08/2025

With less than a month to go until the LLM Hackathon for Applications in Materials & Chemistry, registration is open for the London site. @imperialcollegeldn.bsky.social 📝 Register: llmhackathon.github.io/sites/london/

llmhackathon.github.io

London

Details about the London site for the LLM Hackathon. Find venue information, local schedule, and specific instructions for participants in London.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 13/08/2025

BLASTNet is a much friendlier dataset than it sounds, and is especially useful for those working in space propulsion, chemical reaction optimization, fusion physics, aerospace applications, weather modeling, and more. The team is seeking to collect the highest quality datasets, and needs your help.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 07/08/2025

Does anyone have a science application ready that could benefit from running an MLIP like MACE, MatterSim, or SevenNet at scale? Have a fun collaboration opportunity with free large compute access for the right applications. Reply or DM if interested!

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

Today we are opening the teaming board for the LLM Hackathon for Applications in Materials and Chemistry (Sept 11-12). This is your opportunity to rally a team to help solve big problems! Register here for the link: llmhackathon.github.io

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

You can grow fresh peaches in your yard as far north as Chicago. Quite the unlock.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 22/07/2025

We're about a month and a half away from the 3rd LLM Hackathon for Applications in Materials and Chemistry (Sept 11-12). I hope you will join us! Here are a few reasons to register now. 🤗 Join the preeminent community for LLM and multimodal model applications in materials science and chemistry.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Training data volumes have exploded, but what if we only get one shot to teach a model? Evans et al show a breakthrough: a "distortable canvas" model that mimics human cognition, achieving 80% MNIST accuracy with just 1 example per class. No pretraining needed.

media.tenor.com

a man is singing into a microphone in front of a crowd at a concert .

ALT: a man is singing into a microphone in front of a crowd at a concert .

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Reposted by Ben Blaiszik

Pierpaolo Morgante (He/His) @piermorgante.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

The first (of many, I hope!) challenges articles is finally out! Really excited to be able to provide this service to the #machinelearning community. If you're organizing #hackathons, #MLcompetitions, or similar, please reach out! @iopp-mlresearch.bsky.social #MachineLearningSeries

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

🚀 Announcing the third LLM Hackathon for Applications in Materials and Chemistry (Sept 11-12)! Last year, 34 teams submitted inspiring and open examples. This year, we are expecting amazing applications with higher powered models and agentic frameworks. Your imagination is the only limit.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

A new preprint introduces a Socratic Method Agent that guides LLMs through structured questioning, i.e., definition, analogy, hypothesis elimination, and more following lessons learned from thousands of years of philosophy and reasoning achieving SOTA on the ARC Challenge. Continued below w links:

Figure 2: Accuracy comparison on the ARC Challenge dataset. The SM Agent (this work, shown
in pink) achieves 97.15% overall accuracy, outperforming all prior public submissions (shown in
orange), including GPT-4o+CoT (94.88%). Unlike other top entries, which often rely on ensemble methods or retrieval-augmented inputs, the SM Agent uses only structured prompting via a single Socratic system prompt. Results of previous models are obtained from the AI2 ARC leaderboard.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Son proudly and triumphantly: “We really can accomplish anything” Me: 🥺🥲🫡 Our accomplishment: Getting a Nintendo Switch 2

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Even more open materials and chemistry data for everyone! Think of all the models you could train using these datasets. June updates: 26 high-quality datasets spanning polymer science, drug discovery, spectroscopy, MOF databases, + foundation model training datasets. 🔗: github.com/blaiszik/awe...

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Are you interested in learning about how AI agents could be used in various research tasks? In this talk, Sam Schmidgall discusses "Autonomous Research Assistants". The talk is very accessible for those looking to get started. 📽️ Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lp-...

youtube.com

AI4Science w: Sam Schmidgall

YouTube video by alphaXiv

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

Someone is trying to drop me a subtle hint… #Switch2

Nintendo Switch affixed with a piece of paper with the number two written on it.

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

America and the world's brightest X-ray "microscope" - now 500x brighter. It can: 🔋 watch a battery charge atom by atom, 🛫 help us understand fracture in fighter jet alloys, and 🧬 speed up cancer-drug discovery. Welcome to the new Dept. of Energy Advanced Photon Source at Argonne! 🥳🔬⚡️

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

Building foundation models for chemistry and materials or just interested in open data and open science? This collection is a treasure trove: 🤖 LLM training sets 🔬 Computational datasets ⚗️ Experimental data 📚 Literature datasets Link in next:

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Ok, Claude 4 is 🔥. I built a text-based RPG with my kids, in 1 hour, where players literally reshape reality using AI! The game lets the player speak to create their adventure (rooms, NPCs, and items) in real-time. Magic and adventure meets AI ✨ @anthropic.com

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

Perfect encapsulation of academic family life crossover. 😆

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

The world is hungry for materials data, and today we unveil our revamped Materials Data Facility experience. - Simple publication for datasets from kB to TB - Foundry-ML integration for structured datasets - Reimagined search design

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Ben Blaiszik @benblaiszik.bsky.social · 20/05/2025

The modern software development conundrum. Building today is much easier than 3 months ago, but much harder than it will be 3 months from now.

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