During the 2014 MRS Fall Meeting in Boston, 14 materials scientists came together for 24 hours for MatHack, the world’s first materials hack-athon, to solve real materials problems. A hackathon is a sprint computer programming competition where participants collaborate to create software from scratch in intense sessions over one or two days. Sponsored, in part, by Citrine Informatics and driven by two of its founders (Bryce Meredig and Greg Mulholland) in collaboration with the MRS Academic Affairs Committee, MatHack participants pitched ideas, formed teams, spent one night writing code, and presented their work to a panel of judges from across the materials community.
The idea behind a hackathon is to very quickly build functional (yet imperfect) software to lay the foundation for further development in the future. Such events are common in Silicon Valley; Google and Facebook are renowned hackathon hosts and sponsors. The participants at the first MatHack did just that, demonstrating that even in a field like materials science—traditionally associated with longer-term laboratory investigations—people can produce creative, meaningful scientific software contributions in a very short time.
Mulholland, Greg, and Bryce Meredig. “Hackathon Aims to Solve Materials Problems.” MRS Bulletin 40, no. 4 (April 2015): 366–70. https://doi.org/10.1557/mrs.2015.80.