From August 25-30, 2024, FAIRmat was present at the emc2024 in Copenhagen. The team had a booth in the "Open Science Area", managed by multiple co-workers and collaborators who are active in FAIRmat and experts in electron microscopy.

The event facilitated excellent interaction between researchers and instrument manufacturers. Both researchers and manufacturers greatly appreciated the functionality of our open-source NOMAD service. Especially in electron microscopy, the data is normally extensive, which makes data management more difficult. The scientific community wishes to process the data in the same location where it is stored, eliminating data transfer. Consequently, as a highlight, they acknowledged that NOMAD meets their specific needs since it combines data management with online data processing in one tool. We had engaging and constructive discussions around NOMAD, its implementation, and future developments.

Industry partners such as Microscopy Australia actively approached us and expressed their openness to supporting the metadata standards proposed by FAIRmat. They are aware that precise and long-lasting metadata definitions are necessary to meet the requirements of funding agencies such as DFG.

We are grateful for the fruitful interaction at our FAIRmat booth and the constructive atmosphere within the exhibition area.

In addition to the booth, our co-spokesperson Christoph Koch gave a talk titled "Introducing a FAIR research data management infrastructure for electron microscopy and other condensed matter physics and materials science data" giving an overview of our recent progress in extending NOMAD. In addition, FAIRmat was well presented with several other talks on specific scientific problems.

On August 21 and 22, 2024, we organized two workshops as part the "FAIRmat Community Meets Technology Partners Workshops" series. This time, our focus was on "Data Exchange and Storage in Ellipsometry and Raman Spectroscopy", which is of significant interest to our community.

Both workshops brought together scientific and technical experts to explore the future of data structures for optical spectroscopy methods, emphasizing ellipsometry and Raman spectroscopy. We stressed the importance of FAIR data within the scientific community and its long-term value to society. We introduced and explained the NeXus standard and discussed its current implementations for ellipsometry and Raman spectroscopy. While we gathered valuable ideas for future improvements, the feedback was positive and the current standard was widely accepted. The workshop was attended by representatives from Sentech Instruments GmbH, Park Systems, NFDI4Chem, ELI Beamlines Laser Centre and others.

Additionally, we held a detailed "how-to" session to demonstrate the essential steps for creating NeXus files using Python. Python provides easy access to NeXus as a FAIR data format, enabling lab integration for simple measurement setups. Finally, we outlined the goals and ideas for the next workshop on ellipsometry and Raman spectroscopy.

We are looking forward to the future editions of this workshop series.

Our 4th FAIRmat Users Meeting was held on June 13-14, 2024, and this time, it took place at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg instead of Berlin.

The event was full of exciting activities, including a panel discussion on the future of research data management. The panelists were Jose Marquez, Christoph Koch (HU Berlin), Heiko Weber, Erdman Spiecker (FAU), and Brit Redöhl (DFG).

Our users Ta-Shun Chou, Julia Schumann, and Antonio Delesma Diaz shared their expertise in managing data with NOMAD, covering topics like synthesis via vapor deposition, catalysis, and computation. The event also included three hands-on workshops on NOMAD, adressing both new and experienced users, and introducing our new tool, NOMAD CAMELS, for FAIR data collection.

The two highlights of our 4th Users Meeting were the interactive workshops on RDM education and the engaging "Talk to our experts" session. During the RDM workshop, we explored Michael Krieger and colleagues' teaching approach to research data management. Two students who took this course last semester provided valuable insights and critical feedback. During the "Talk to our experts" sessions, users had the opportunity to chat casually with our developers about NOMAD, ask questions, and discuss future developments.

We introduced our new comic characters, Lisa, Thomas, and Henry, who represent our users and partners. These characters will soon feature in our social media content and at conferences. Looking ahead, we are excited to further develop these characters through storytelling to enhance community building and refine the FAIRmat communication strategy. This will enable us to better engage with our audience and address the needs of the research community regarding FAIR data.

The FAIRmat seminar talks held by Giovanni Vignale on "Geometric Density Functional Theory" on May 14, 2024, and Janosh Riebesell on "Foundational Machine Learning Potentials - Challenges and Opportunities" on May 23, 2024, are now available on our YouTube channel.

Recordings of FAIRmat Tutorial 14 are now available on the FAIRmat and NOMAD YouTube channel! The full playlist includes:

• Working with the NOMAD-Simulations schema plugin
• Developing schemas and parsers for FAIR computational data storage
• Extending NOMAD-Simulations to support custom methods and outputs
• Interfacing complex simulation and analysis workflows with NOMAD

Read more about the FAIRmat hands-on tutorial series here. You find all the learning material for Tutorial 14 on GitHub.

The 5th edition of the FAIRmat newsletter is now available to download on our website! Stay up to date with all developments in our project, read an interesting interview with our user Ta-Shun Chou, and read many more articles from the FAIRmat community.

Recordings of FAIRmat Tutorial 13 are now available on the FAIRmat and NOMAD YouTube channel! The full playlist includes:

• NOMAD’s Base Sections and Built in schemas for ELN
• Schema & Plugin development
• Deploying your NOMAD plugins

Read more about the FAIRmat hands-on tutorial series here.

FAIRmat had a wonderful experience at the Lange Nacht der Wissenschaft on June 22, 2024. Our team was amazed by the overwhelming turnout and the enthusiastic response from the visitors to our booth, which focused on research data management and coding using Lego to gamify these topics. Engaging with the public, sharing our research, and seeing the curiosity and excitement of the public was incredibly rewarding.

Special thanks go out to our colleagues at CSMB for their organization and collaboration during this event.

We look forward to participating in next year’s edition!

Here are a few highlights from the event:

We are delighted to announce the FAIR-DI Award for Data Handling in a PhD Thesis. The FAIR-DI Award recognizes an exceptional PhD Thesis in the field of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-purposable) data.

The recipient of this award will have the opportunity to present their thesis at the FAIR-DI European Conference on Data Intelligence 2024 (Karlsruhe, Germany, 27-30 Oct 2024) and will receive a prize of €2000.

FAIRmat recently organized a highly successful satellite event of the LLM (Large Language Model) Hackathon for Applications in Materials and Chemistry at the Center for the Science of Materials Berlin (CSMB) from May 6 - 8. The event welcomed approximately 50 participants from esteemed institutions such as Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (FSU), Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM), Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. The hackathon began with an engaging introductory talk by Kevin Jablonka, followed by lively discussions.

The event served as a platform to showcase innovative applications of LLMs in materials science. Participants were deeply involved in various projects and had the opportunity to present their work, with some even taking part in the global competition. A collection of submitted projects can be found online. Notably, our colleague Bernadette Mohr was a member of the prize-winning team “LangSIM”, and their project pitch is now available online. Additionally, our co-workers Nathan Daelman and Hampus Näsström were part of teams that received the Anthropic prize. The level of achievement demonstrated in just three days during the focused hackathon left us deeply impressed and delighted.