We were pleased to host Lars Kotthoff, Professor of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, during his visit to the Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI).

During his lecture titled “AI for Materials Science: Tuning Laser-Induced Graphene Production”, Prof. Kotthoff presented how artificial intelligence and machine learning can be effectively applied to optimize advanced materials fabrication processes. His work focuses on the use of surrogate models combined with Bayesian optimization to automate parameter tuning for laser-induced graphene production.

This technique enables the creation of thin conductive structures within insulating materials, with promising applications in next-generation nano-circuits and emerging domains such as in-space manufacturing. The presented approach demonstrated improvements of up to a factor of two compared to existing methods and human expert solutions, while maintaining reproducibility.

The implementation is based on the open-source mlr and mlrMBO frameworks and highlights the broader potential of automated machine learning methodologies across domains.

We sincerely thank Prof. Kotthoff for the inspiring talk, as well as all participants for the engaging discussion and valuable exchange of ideas.