Masahiko Demura is Director of the Research Network and Facility Service Division at National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), Japan.
He earned his B.Eng. (1993) and M.Eng. (1995) from the University of Tokyo (U. Tokyo), and received his Dr.Eng. (2003) in Materials Science and Engineering from the same institution.
He has served as Deputy Director for Nanotechnology and Materials at the Cabinet Office (2014–2015), Project Professor at U. Tokyo (2015–2017), and Director of MaDIS (2020–2023).
He was also a Visiting Scientist at the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschung and is currently a Visiting Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is a leading member of the Materials DX Platform initiative, and his research focuses on digital transformation in materials science, especially for structural materials.
Materials DX Platform Initiatives in Japan
We are now in an era where data is paramount, and data-driven research leveraging large datasets is anticipated to spur new innovations in materials development. Over the years, we have amassed extensive materials data and built a suite of regulated, reference databases called MatNavi [1], which serve as vital resources for data-driven materials research.
Equally critical is capturing and utilizing data generated in everyday research activities. Since 2017, we have been developing and applying foundational technologies to collect these daily datasets. Through numerous trials, we concluded that immediate structuring and registration at the point of data generation is most effective. This realization led us to create RDE [2], a system dedicated to on-the-spot data structuring and registration.
Building on these practices at NIMS, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) initiated the Materials DX Platform Initiatives across Japan around 2022, as depicted in Fig. 1. The initiatives comprise three national projects: the Advanced Research Infrastructure for Materials and Nanotechnology (ARIM), which facilitates shared use of facilities and data; the Materials Data Platform, which provides infrastructure for accumulating and utilizing data; and the Data creation & utilization-type MaTerial R&D project (DxMT), which advances data-driven materials research. In this presentation, I will outline Japan’s Materials DX Platform efforts, focusing on NIMS’s role in these initiatives.
References
[1] MatNavi. https://mits.nims.go.jp. [2] RDE. https://dice.nims.go.jp/services/RDE/
