From April 20–22, 2021, I had the possibility to be part of a virtual workshop on Autonomous Discovery in Science and Engineering (website) organized by the Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

I gave a talk on Autonomous Experiments for Neutron Three-Axis Spectrometers (TAS) with Log-Gaussian Processes in the breakout session on Autonomous Discovery in Neutron Scattering. The presentation covered recent methodological advances of our group in the application of log-Gaussian processes for autonomous neutron scattering experiments.

Other talks were either focussing on physical applications or were showing methodological approaches to autonomous material discovery. Although I was not able to fully follow the physics parts, I got a decent impression of what the problems are that groups try to solve in this area.

[EDIT: You can find an extended abstract of our contribution on arXiv.]
[EDIT: The material of the workshop (including a DOE report) and the slides of my talk are available.]