AI Advancements Forge Path for Precise Material ‘Fingerprints’
Columbia engineers have developed a new AI (Artificial Intelligence) that has shattered a long-held belief in forensics- that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person are unique. They are similar; only we have to compare fingerprints the wrong way.
Like people, materials evolve. They also behave differently when they are relaxed and stressed. Scientists looking to measure the dynamics of how materials change have developed a new technique that leverages X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS), Artificial Intelligence, and machine learning.
This technique creates “fingerprints” of different materials that can be read and analyzed by a neural network to yield new data and information that scientists previously could not access. Also, a neural network is a computer model that makes decisions like the human brain.
James (Jay) Horwath, the first author of the study, said, “Also, these patterns are too challenging for scientists to detect without the aid of AI (Artificial Intelligence), “As we are shining the Xray bream, the patterns are so diverse and so complicated that it becomes difficult even for the experts to understand what any of them mean easily.”
The project is called AI (Artificial Intelligence) for Non-equilibrium Relaxation Dynamics, or AI-NERD. The fingerprints are designed and created using a technique known as autoencoder. An autoencoder is a type of neural network that can transform the original image data into the fingerprint, which scientists call a latent representation. It also incorporates a decoder algorithm to go from the latent representation back to the full image.
Also, the researchers’ goal was to try to create a map of the materials’ fingerprints, clustering together fingerprints with similar characteristics into neighborhoods. By looking holistically at the features of the various fingerprint neighborhoods on the map, the researchers were able to better understand how the materials were structured and how they evolved over time as they were stressed and relaxed.
