Ju Li

Stories

AI-driven autonomous labs transform materials discovery

Leading CRESt autonomous discovery platform

Multi-agent AI systems now design, run, and analyze materials experiments with minimal human input. In January 2026, China's Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology published MARS, coordinating 19 large language model agents with robots. A September 2026 paper in Nature Machine Intelligence introduced MatBrain, a lightweight system that generated 30,000 candidate crystal structures in 48 hours.

Updated Oct 26

MIT model pairs 3D crystal structures with text to help AI identify materials

New Capabilities

Active researcher at MIT

MIT researchers have built a model called CLaC that reads a crystal's three-dimensional atomic arrangement alongside text descriptions. Their paper appeared in Nature Communications on August 26, and MIT News described the work on October 18.

Updated Oct 23

Notable Quotes

CRESt is an assistant, not a replacement, for human researchers. Human researchers are still indispensable. We use natural language so the system can explain what it is doing and present observations and hypotheses.

from AI-driven autonomous labs transform materials discovery · Updated Oct 26

Structure is really at the heart of the materials science field. If you understand the structure, you can infer quite a lot about the properties and performance of materials.

from MIT model pairs 3D crystal structures with text to help AI identify materials · Updated Oct 23