Wen Chen (U. South California, United States)
Qi Ge (SUSTech, China)
Cui Huachen (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China)
Jaehyung Ju (Shanghai Jiaotong University, China)
Carlos Portela (MIT, United States)
Jerry Qi (Georgia Instityte of Technology, China)
Renee Zhao (Stanford, United States)
Mingchao Liu (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom)
Damiano Pasini (McGill University, Canada)
Yifan Wang (NTU, Singapore)
Lu Yang (CityU HK, Hong Kong)
Hongying Zhang (NUS, Singapore)

Moving towards sustainable economies with net-zero pollution and developing resilient infrastructures, while mitigating the impact of natural disasters, require drastic changes in designing new and advanced materials. New structures will need to bear more load with less materials and be programmable to be intelligent in order to sense, process the loading conditions and take actions. Enhancing the programmability and intelligence would allow the materials to maximise their performance, be responsive to the changes of surrounding environments, helping to reduce the waste and pollution throughout the lifetime of materials. Enhancing the degree of intelligence of materials also enables new developments of multi-scale smart systems in robotics and artificial intelligence, better emulating the intelligence of living species. Such material intelligence can be well learnt from nature. Indeed, nature has long been an inspiration for advanced architected materials with intricate and hierarchical structures and multifunctionality. Recently, the development of architected metamaterials is accelerating, featuring periodic repetition of building blocks, either uniformly or hierarchically, to achieve extreme mechanical and multifunctional performance that surpass even natural materials, such as negative Poisson’s ratio, negative refractive index, etc. Their extraordinary performance arises from their structure design rather than their chemistry. Engineering the internal meso-structures offers the materials designer new opportunities to program the material responses. The advancement of these architected materials is highly multidisciplinary, involving development in design, materials processing, characterization, numerical analysis, and has enabled many advanced applications in mechanics, acoustics, electromagnetics, and optics, etc. Therefore, we cordially invite academics, postdocs and PhD students to attend and discuss their findings and share new findings in developing programmable architected materials for intelligent systems, in particular with regards to:

– Architected materials and systems inspired by principles found in living nature.
– Advancements in design approaches, including topology optimization, numerical tools, and AI-enabled methods, etc.
– Advanced manufacturing technologies and platforms to realise the design of architected materials, including additive manufacturing, field-assisted process, freeze casting, self-assembly, etc.
– Architected metamaterials with extreme mechanical properties, programmable properties, or functional properties in acoustic, electromagnetic, piezoelectric, etc.
– Sustainable applications: passive morphing mechanisms, biodegradable or biosourced architected materials, intelligent adaptive systems, etc.