News & Comment

Navigating built environments can be a challenge for persons with disabilities. Emerging computational capabilities are promising to help by providing the right information at the right time in accessible formats.

The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms for public use has led to many creative healthcare applications, some with the potential to create or worsen health inequities. Here, we argue that similar to prescription medicine labels, AI algorithms should be accompanied by a responsible use label.

The widespread availability of digital traces capturing individuals’ daily mobility has the potential to enrich the understanding of the relationship between mobility, gender and socioeconomic factors. In fact, it has led to a heightened interest in deriving policy insights from these data. However, it is also essential to put the focus on methodological aspects to address the data gaps and biases.

The current global economy heavily relies on digital and data-based technologies, which have the use of supercomputing at their core. Latin America is a vast source of human talent in computer science, but the lag in infrastructure investment due to economic and political struggles may cause the economic development of the region to fall behind.

We can design, build and use AI systems with intentionality, to make them an equalizing force within society, or we can use AI without intentionality, in which case AI could become a force that exacerbates inequality, or both. Society has the power to decide which.

Additive manufacturing plays an essential role in producing metamaterials by precisely controlling geometries and multiscale structures to achieve the desired properties. In this Comment, we highlight the challenges and opportunities from additive manufacturing for computational metamaterials design.

Optical and wave-based computing is attracting renewed interest, motivated by the need for new platforms for resource-intensive special-purpose processing tasks. Here, we discuss whether, why, and how metamaterials and metasurfaces could contribute to achieving an ‘optical advantage’ in computing.

In recent years, there has been a surge of interest in the design of mechanical metamaterials for different science and engineering applications. In particular, various computational approaches have been developed to facilitate the systematic design of art-inspired metamaterials including origami and kirigami metamaterials. In this Comment, we highlight the recent advances and discuss the outlook for the computational design of art-inspired metamaterials.

Since the first isolation of oxygen, chemists have explored oxygen reduction and evolution reactions. Now, computational chemists are trying to understand and predict the best catalysts for them. Here, the importance of various considerations for such calculations, as well as their challenges and opportunities, are discussed.

Human mobility research intersects with various disciplines, with profound implications for urban planning, transportation engineering, public health, disaster management, and economic analysis. Here, we discuss the urgent need for open and standardized datasets in the field, including current challenges and lessons from other computational science domains, and propose collaborative efforts to enhance the validity and reproducibility of human mobility research.

Software is much more than just code. It is time to confront the complexity of licenses, uses, governance, infrastructure and other facets of software in science. Their influence is ubiquitous yet overlooked.

As machine learning models are becoming mainstream tools for molecular and materials research, there is an urgent need to improve the nature, quality, and accessibility of atomistic data. In turn, there are opportunities for a new generation of generally applicable datasets and distillable models.

Morphing soft matter, which is capable of changing its shape and function in response to stimuli, has wide-ranging applications in robotics, medicine and biology. Recently, computational models have accelerated its development. Here, we highlight advances and challenges in developing computational techniques, and explore the potential applications enabled by such models.

Wildfires have increased in frequency and intensity due to climate change and have had severe impacts on the built environment worldwide. Moving forward, models should take inspiration from epidemic network modeling to predict damage to individual buildings and understand the impact of different mitigations on the community vulnerability in a network setting.

Digital twins hold immense promise in accelerating scientific discovery, but the publicity currently outweighs the evidence base of success. We summarize key research opportunities in the computational sciences to enable digital twin technologies, as identified by a recent National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine consensus study report.

Digital twins of Earth have the capability to offer versatile access to detailed information on our changing world, helping societies to adapt to climate change and to manage the effects of local impacts, globally. Nevertheless, human interaction with digital twins requires advances in computational science, particularly where complex geophysical data is turned into information to support decision making.

Urban digital twins hold immense promise as live computational models of cities, synthesizing diverse knowledge, streaming data, and supporting decisions towards more inclusive planning and policy. The size, heterogeneity, and open-ended character of cities, however, pose many difficult questions, at the frontiers of what is currently possible in computational science. Overcoming these challenges provides pathways for fundamental progress in the field and a proving ground for its economic value and social relevance.

We highlight the challenges and opportunities in organic redox flow battery research, underscoring the need for collaborative research efforts. The synergy between computation and experimentation holds the potential to expedite progress in this field and can have far-reaching impacts beyond energy storage applications.