Artificial intelligence enabled smart design and manufacturing of advanced materials: The endless Frontier in AI+ era

Future-oriented Science & Technology (S&T) Strategies trigger the innovative developments of advanced materials, providing an envision to the significant progress of leading-/cutting-edge science, engineering, and technologies for the next few decades. Motivated by Made in China 2025 and New Material Power Strategy by 2035, several key viewpoints about automated research workflows for accelerated discovery and smart manufacturing of advanced materials in terms of AI for Science and main respective of big data, database, standards, and ecosystems are discussed. Referring to classical toolkits at various spatial and temporal scales, AI-based toolkits and AI-enabled computations for material design are compared, highlighting the dominant role of the AI agent paradigm. Our recent developed ProME platform together with its functions is introduced briefly. A case study of AI agent assistant welding is presented, which is consisted of the large language model, auto-coding via AI agent, image processing, image mosaic, and machine learning for welding defect detection. Finally, more duties are called to educate the next generation workforce with creative minds and skills. It is believed that the transformation of knowledge-enabled data-driven integrated computational material engineering era to AI⁺ era promotes the transformation of smart design and manufacturing paradigm from “designing the materials” to “designing with materials.”