Data science helps engineers discover new materials for solar cells and LEDs

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a high-throughput computational method to design new materials for next generation solar cells and LEDs. Their approach generated 13 new material candidates for solar cells and 23 new candidates for LEDs. Calculations predicted that these materials, called hybrid halide semiconductors, would be stable and exhibit excellent optoelectronic properties.The team published their findings on May 22, 2019 in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.Hybrid halide semiconductors are materials that consist of an inorganic framework housing organic cations. They show unique material properties that are not found in organic or inorganic materials alone.A subclass of these materials, called hybrid halide perovskites, have attracted a lot of attention as promising materials for next generation solar cells and LED devices because of their exceptional optoelectronic properties and inexpensive fabrication costs. However, hybrid perovskites are not very stable and contain lead, making them unsuitable for commercial devices.Seeking alternatives to perovskites, a team of researchers led by Kesong Yang, a nanoengineering professor at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, used computational tools, data mining and data screening techniques to discover new hybrid halide materials beyond perovskites that are stable and lead-free. "We are looking past perovskite structures to find a new space to design hybrid semiconductor materials for optoelectronics." Yang said.Yang's team started by going through the two largest quantum materials databases, AFLOW and The Materials Project, and analyzing all compounds that were similar in chemical composition to lead halide perovskites. Then they extracted 24 prototype structures to use as templates for generating hybrid organic-inorganic materials structures.Next, they performed high-throughput quantum mechanics calculations on the prototype structures to build a comprehensive quantum materials repository containing 4,507 hypothetical hybrid halide compounds. Using efficient data mining and data screening algorithms, Yang's team rapidly identified 13 candidates for solar cell materials and 23 candidates for LEDs out of all the hypothetical compounds.

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Airbyte Racks Up Awards from InfoWorld, BigDATAwire, Built In; Builds Largest and Fastest-Growing User Community

Airbyte | January 30, 2024

Airbyte, creators of the leading open-source data movement infrastructure, today announced a series of accomplishments and awards reinforcing its standing as the largest and fastest-growing data movement community. With a focus on innovation, community engagement, and performance enhancement, Airbyte continues to revolutionize the way data is handled and processed across industries. “Airbyte proudly stands as the front-runner in the data movement landscape with the largest community of more than 5,000 daily users and over 125,000 deployments, with monthly data synchronizations of over 2 petabytes,” said Michel Tricot, co-founder and CEO, Airbyte. “This unparalleled growth is a testament to Airbyte's widespread adoption by users and the trust placed in its capabilities.” The Airbyte community has more than 800 code contributors and 12,000 stars on GitHub. Recently, the company held its second annual virtual conference called move(data), which attracted over 5,000 attendees. Airbyte was named an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award finalist: Data Management – Integration (in October) for cutting-edge products that are changing how IT organizations work and how companies do business. And, at the start of this year, was named to the Built In 2024 Best Places To Work Award in San Francisco – Best Startups to Work For, recognizing the company's commitment to fostering a positive work environment, remote and flexible work opportunities, and programs for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Today, the company received the BigDATAwire Readers/Editors Choice Award – Big Data and AI Startup, which recognizes companies and products that have made a difference. Other key milestones in 2023 include the following. Availability of more than 350 data connectors, making Airbyte the platform with the most connectors in the industry. The company aims to increase that to 500 high-quality connectors supported by the end of this year. More than 2,000 custom connectors were created with the Airbyte No-Code Connector Builder, which enables data connectors to be made in minutes. Significant performance improvement with database replication speed increased by 10 times to support larger datasets. Added support for five vector databases, in addition to unstructured data sources, as the first company to build a bridge between data movement platforms and artificial intelligence (AI). Looking ahead, Airbyte will introduce data lakehouse destinations, as well as a new Publish feature to push data to API destinations. About Airbyte Airbyte is the open-source data movement infrastructure leader running in the safety of your cloud and syncing data from applications, APIs, and databases to data warehouses, lakes, and other destinations. Airbyte offers four products: Airbyte Open Source, Airbyte Self-Managed, Airbyte Cloud, and Powered by Airbyte. Airbyte was co-founded by Michel Tricot (former director of engineering and head of integrations at Liveramp and RideOS) and John Lafleur (serial entrepreneur of dev tools and B2B). The company is headquartered in San Francisco with a distributed team around the world. To learn more, visit airbyte.com.

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