What’s AMAD?

AMAD (Aalto Materials Digitalization Platform) is the open materials data infrastructure for Aalto University. Simply, AMAD is an intuitive digital lab notebook platform that is designed with particular focus on data and collaboration. Unlike most digital notebooks currently available, AMAD lets the user seamlessly incorporate data into their notebooks, process and visualise it. An intuitive permission system allows notebooks and their data to be shared with collaborators.

By using AMAD, scientists and researchers can:

• plan and organise their work

• manage and share their data

• prepare data for long-term storage

• carry out analysis

• apply machine-learning tools

All studies, computational or experimental, are organised into Notebooks that are essentially a list of descriptors for steps and events occurred during the experiment. Each entry in a notebook is called a step, and combining steps of different kind, the users create fully functional hypertext notebooks that describe the procedure, include measured data and show interactive plots.

By reformatting the uploaded data into its built-in types, AMAD ensures that data can be understood and re-used by your collaborators with minimal effort. It is an excellent solution for storing, managing, and sharing information. Using AMAD is an excellent way to fulfil all the usual requirements imposed by funding agencies regarding data management. AMAD aims to be a novel ecosystem for materials design and development, ultimately connecting academic, industrial, governmental and societal stakeholders.

The front-end is made with plain JavaScript, while the back-end was developed with Flask, and deployed on an NGINX and gunicorn web server combo. All data in the system (user/group details, notebooks, …) are stored as document objects by MongoDB.

AMAD is developed by Nanolayers Research Computing Ltd.. The development of the Aalto Materials Digitalization Platform has been partly funded with support from the Academy of Finland.