What's special about AI for Formulations?

Hannah Melia, Citrine Informatics

Whether you are formulating plastics, paint or perfume, there are some fundamental truths. You are optimizing many different properties, sustainability, cost,  aesthetics, mechanical properties etc. You have thousands of different possible ingredients and additives to choose from. There are hundreds of possible processing parameters. And most impactfully, it is expensive and time consuming to run tests.  In this environment, search spaces are huge and discontinuous and data is small and sparse. For this reason, AI systems for the formulation industry are special. They need to use expert knowledge to build search spaces and improve models, optimize over discontinuous search spaces, guide experimentation using small data sets and leverage the laws of physics.  This talk will demonstrate how this is currently done by Citrine and industrial companies and outline some of the benefits they are seeing from using these systems. Particular attention will be paid to how formulators can apply sophisticated constraints on ingredients and processing parameters across processing steps.