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The Department of Science & Technology, Govt. of India launched a new collaborative initiative in energy innovation and IIT Kanpur will work as a lead institute on one of the three ICMAP (Integrated Clean Energy Material Acceleration Platform).

Minister of Science and Technology Dr. Jitendra Singh launched the Integrated Clean Energy Material Acceleration Platforms at the Mission Innovation Annual Gathering session.

Dr. Singh allotted the citations to the 03 respective centre leads of the ICMAP. The aim of these Material Acceleration Platforms is to benefit the emerging capabilities in next-generation Computing, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics to speed up the process of materials discovery by 10 times.

In ICMAP, IIT Kanpur is the lead institute on Materials and Prof. Kanwar Singh Nalwa of Sustainable Energy Engineering is the Center Head.

Director of IIT Kanpur Prof. Abhay Karandikar, while speaking on the announcement, said, "I am delighted to share this on behalf of our institute that we have been given the responsibility to lead one of the three Integrated Clean Energy Material Acceleration Platforms. This is a noble step taken by the DST for clean energy solutions as well as accelerating the pace of innovations in energy".

The platforms comprise a knowledge system of over 38 elite institutions and 80 research personnel working on low-cost next-generation advanced energy materials.

The objective of the platform is to create materials for energy harvesting by utilizing quantum and classical mechanics-enabled atomistic simulations and AI & ML algorithms. The team of engaged researchers comprises scientists from 13 elite institutions.

IISER Thiruvananthapuram and IIT Hyderabad will be the lead institutes in the other two MAPs whereas IIT Hyderabad will lead on Bioenergy and Hydrogen and IISER Thiruvananthapuram will lead on Storage.