The Toyota Research Institute will invest $35 million in artificial intelligence and machine learning to speed up the development of advanced battery materials and fuel cell catalysts to power future zero-emissions and carbon-neutral vehicles.

"Toyota recognizes that artificial intelligence is a vital basic technology that can be leveraged across a range of industries, and we are proud to use it to expand the boundaries of materials science," said Eric Krotkov, the institute's chief science officer. "Accelerating the pace of materials discovery will help lay the groundwork for the future of clean energy and bring us even closer to achieving Toyota's vision of reducing global average new-vehicle CO2 emissions by 90% by 2050."

Initial research projects include collaborations with Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, the University at Buffalo, the University of Connecticut, and the United Kingdom-based materials science company Ilika.

"This represents a fantastic opportunity to drastically advance the use of databases and machine learning methods in materials discovery," said Jens Norskov, a Stanford University professor and director of the SUNCAT center. "The partnership combines theory, computation and experiment in an unprecedented, concerted effort. We are particularly excited by prospects for an avant-garde approach to catalyst development for fuel cells."

Research will merge advanced computational materials modeling, new sources of experimental data, machine learning and artificial intelligence in an effort to reduce the time scale for new materials development, according to Toyota.