Cognitive Materials Discovery and Onset of the 5th Discovery Paradigm

The discovery of novel materials can generate immense technological, economic, and social benefits. However, these are slow, challenging, expert-intensive efforts. Our thesis is that new capabilities of cognitive computing—particularly natural language processing, knowledge representation, and automated reasoning—are poised to transform the process of materials discovery and take us from our current “4th paradigm” of discovery driven by data science and machine learning to a “5th paradigm” era where cognitive systems seamlessly integrate information from human experts, experimental data, physics-based models, and data-driven models to speed discovery. We discuss the key bottlenecks to discovery that need to be removed to enable this new approach and illustrate progress towards this cognitive future with examples from IBM research efforts as well as the broader literature.