CRUX: Crowdsourced Materials Science Resource and Workflow Exploration

Mengying Wang, Hanchao Ma, Abhishek Daundkar, Sheng Guan, Yiyang Bian, Alp Sehirlioglu, Yinghui Wu

Abstract: Modern multidisciplinary materials science routinely processes scientific workflows that integrate different data resources (e.g., X-ray data, scripts, analytical results). Most of such data resources are isolated in research labs, created ad-hocly, and remain underutilized. We demonstrate CRUX, a Crowdsourced platform for materials data ResoUrces and workflow eXploration. CRUX is empowered by coherent data-workflow modeling, knowledge-based resource assembly for workflow search, and data provenance to support workflow exploration. CRUX allows users to declare parameterized workflows as graph patterns, and automatically recommends crowdsourced resources with quality guarantees. We demonstrate the ease-of-use and the performance of CRUX with three categories of queries: data search, workflow recommendation, and resource exploration. We make case of CRUX for peak finding in X-ray Diffraction (XRD) data, a cornerstone task in materials research. We show that CRUX enables new interactive paradigms to explore and design workflows for data analysts in general.