Generating droplets from a continuous stream of fluid requires precise tuning of a device to find optimized control parameter conditions. It is analytically intractable to compute the necessary control parameter values of a droplet-generating device that produces optimized droplets. Furthermore, as the length scale of the fluid flow changes, the formation physics and optimized conditions that induce flow decomposition into droplets also change. Hence, a single proportional integral derivative controller is too inflexible to optimize devices of different length scales or different control parameters, while classification machine learning techniques take days to train and require millions of droplet images. Therefore, the question is posed, can a single method be created that universally optimizes multiple length-scale droplets using only a few data points and is faster than previous approaches? In this paper, a Bayesian optimization and computer vision feedback loop is designed to quickly and reliably discover the control parameter values that generate optimized droplets within different length-scale devices. This method is demonstrated to converge on optimum parameter values using 60 images in only 2.3 h, 30× faster than previous approaches. Model implementation is demonstrated for two different length-scale devices: a milliscale inkjet device and a microfluidics device.

This study is motivated by the desire to disseminate a low-cost, high-precision, high-throughput environmental chamber to test materials and devices under elevated humidity, temperature, and light. This paper documents the...

Needle-in-a-Haystack problems exist across a wide range of applications including rare disease prediction, ecological resource management, fraud detection, and material property optimization. A Needle-in-a-Haystack problem arises when there is an extreme imbalance of optimum conditions relative to the size of the dataset. However, current state-of-the-art optimization algorithms are not designed with the capabilities to find solutions to these challenging multidimensional Needle-in-a-Haystack problems, resulting in slow convergence or pigeonholing into a local minimum. In this paper, we present a Zooming Memory-Based Initialization algorithm, entitled ZoMBI, that builds on conventional Bayesian optimization principles to quickly and efficiently optimize Needle-in-a-Haystack problems in both less time and fewer experiments. The ZoMBI algorithm demonstrates compute time speed-ups of 400× compared to traditional Bayesian optimization as well as efficiently discovering optima in under 100 experiments that are up to 3× more highly optimized than those discovered by similar methods.

This study is motivated by the desire to disseminate a low-cost, high-precision, high-throughput environmental chamber to test materials and devices under elevated humidity, temperature, and light. This paper documents the creation of an open-source tool with a bill of materials as low as US$2,000, and the subsequent evolution of three second-generation tools installed at three different universities spanning thin films, bulk crystals, and thin-film solar-cell devices. We introduce an optical proxy measurement to detect real-time phase changes in materials. We present correlations between this optical proxy and standard X-ray diffraction measurements, describe some edge cases where the proxy measurement fails, and report key learnings from the technology-translation process. By sharing lessons learned, we hope that future open-hardware development and translation efforts can proceed with reduced friction. Throughout the paper, we provide examples of scientific impact, wherein participating laboratories used their environmental chambers to study and improve the stabilities of halide-perovskite materials. All generations of hardware bills of materials, assembly instructions, and operating codes are available in open-source repositories.

Needle-in-a-Haystack problems exist across a wide range of applications including rare disease prediction, ecological resource management, fraud detection, and material property optimization. A Needle-in-a-Haystack problem arises when there is an extreme imbalance of optimum conditions relative to the size of the dataset. For example, only 0.82% out of 146k total materials in the open-access Materials Project database have a negative Poisson's ratio. However, current state-of-the-art optimization algorithms are not designed with the capabilities to find solutions to these challenging multidimensional Needle-in-a-Haystack problems, resulting in slow convergence to a global optimum or pigeonholing into a local minimum. In this paper, we present a Zooming Memory-Based Initialization algorithm, entitled ZoMBI, that builds on conventional Bayesian optimization principles to quickly and efficiently optimize Needle-in-a-Haystack problems in both less time and fewer experiments by addressing the common convergence and pigeonholing issues. ZoMBI actively extracts knowledge from the previously best-performing evaluated experiments to iteratively zoom in the sampling search bounds towards the global optimum "needle" and then prunes the memory of low-performing historical experiments to accelerate compute times by reducing the algorithm time complexity from O(n3) to O(1), as the number of experiments sampled increases. Additionally, ZoMBI implements two custom acquisition functions that use active learning to further guide the sampling of new experiments towards the global optimum. We validate the algorithm's performance on two real-world 5-dimensional Needle-in-a-Haystack material property optimization datasets: discovery of auxetic Poisson's ratio materials and discovery of high thermoelectric figure of merit materials. The ZoMBI algorithm demonstrates compute time speed-ups of 400x compared to traditional Bayesian optimization as well as efficiently discovering materials in under 100 experiments that are up to 3x more highly optimized than those discovered by current state-of-the-art algorithms.