June 2025
At CVPR 2025, UT Knoxville’s AE-SPM group debuted AI-driven automated microscopy with Sergei Kalinin’s keynote and tool showcases by Utkarsh Pratiush and Yu Liu. Know more
We’re excited to welcome Colin and Adrian to our team as Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Summer Interns!
Excited to share the summary of our 1st hackathon on AI & Machine Learning in Microscopy! Our preprint, ‘Mic-hackathon 2024: Hackathon on Machine Learning for Electron and Scanning Probe Microscopy,’ is now available on here and is full of insights into how machine learning is shaping the future of microscopy.
Utkarsh Pratiush starts his Summer Internship with Western Digital’s U.S. Analytical Sciences division in Silicon Valley
May 2025
The AE-SPM team, in partnership with Prof. Gerd Duscher and the AReMS, is pleased to announce the successful conclusion of the 3rd Summer School on Machine Learning & Automation in Electron Microscopy. Held in a hybrid format, the school welcomed over 100 participants globally, fostering an international exchange of knowledge and advancements in the field. Click here for the presentations
April 2025
We are happy to announce the 3rd Summer School on Machine Learning & Automation in Electron Microscopy from May 19 to May 23, 2025.
March 2025
Our group lead Sergei Kalinin was honored with the David Adler Lectureship Award in the 2025 APS March meeting for sustained leadership and vision in integrating machine learning methods with physical sciences, particularly in the development of autonomous electron and scanning probe microscopies and applications to nanoscale electromechanics of ferroelectric and energy materials.
AE-SPM group lead Sergei V. Kalinin and colleagues have been granted US patent “Machine learning-driven operation of instrumentation with human in the loop.” This system fuses human expertise and ML to steer automated experiments on advanced microscopes, boosting data-collection efficiency by up to 100×.
January 2025
Congrats Utkarsh has been inducted into the Perplexity’s Spring 2025 Campus Strategist program.
December 2024
Our team at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville successfully hosted its first Machine Learning for Electron and Scanning Probe Microscopy Hackathon, drawing 70 participants from top institutions worldwide and yielding 20 cutting-edge project submissions. GANder (ferroelastic–ferroelectric domain translation) took 1st place, followed by AutoScript Copilot and Structure Discovery through Image-to-Graph, with special awards for collaborative and innovative microscopy solutions. Read more
August 2024
Our team had the opportunity to present our research at the Microscopy and Microanalysis Conference 2024 in Cleveland, Ohio.
- Multimodal Co-orchestration for Exploring Structure-Property Relationships in Combinatorial Libraries via Multi-Task Bayesian Optimization – Sergei Kalinin et al.,
- Synergizing Theoretical Model Development and Experimentation through the Bayesian Co-navigation Workflow – Sergei Kalinin et al.,
- Human-in-the-Loop Automated Experiment Simulated with Scanning Tunneling Microscopy – Richard Liu et al.,
- Realizing Smart STEM via Machine Learning on Remote High Performance Computer – Utkarsh Pratiush et al.,
- Reward Driven Image Analysis Workflow in Static and Active Learning – Kamyar Barakati et al.,
June 2024
Our group is proud to announce the release of our initial series of papers. Congratulations to Richard Liu, Kamyar Barkati, and Aditya Raghavan for their remarkable contributions. Below are the papers:
- Integration of Scanning Probe Microscope with High-Performance Computing: fixed-policy and reward-driven workflows implementation
- Building Workflows for Interactive Human in the Loop Automated Experiment (hAE) in STEM-EELS
- Physics-based reward driven image analysis in microscopy
- Evolution of ferroelectric properties in SmxBi1-xFeO3 via automated Piezoresponse Force Microscopy across combinatorial spread libraries
May 2024
Congratulations to Utkarsh Pratiush for winning first place in the “LLM Applications in Materials and Chemistry 2024” competition. This is a well-deserved honor, and we are proud to have you as a member of the AE-SPM group.August 2023
Welcoming the graduate students to the group with an in person dinner event.
The AE-SPM group is setting up the lab and adding the Jupiter AFM from Oxford Instruments, which will be instrumental for our early career researchers.