The speaker's team has hypothesized that automated characterization is a major bottleneck because powder mixing alone is of limited value without analyzing results and intelligently selecting subsequent experiments.

“I mean from the beginning our hypothesis has been that one of the big bottlenecks is automated characterization because it's not that hard to mix powders to get to try stuff but if you can't characterize and analyze it and then decide what the next step should be intelligently you don't really benefit much.”

“much from mixing powders randomly so we focused a lot on automated characterization closing the loop with simulations because that's how you like try a lot of things make an informed decision and then decide what to do the next day”