Molecule Generation Experience: An Open Platform of Material Design for Public Users

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven material design has been attracting great attentions as a groundbreaking technology across a wide spectrum of industries. Molecular design is particularly important owing to its broad application domains and boundless creativity attributed to progresses in generative models. The recent maturity of molecular generative models has stimulated expectations for practical use among potential users, who are not necessarily familiar with coding or scripting, such as experimental engineers and students in chemical domains. However, most of the existing molecular generative models are Python libraries on GitHub, that are accessible for only IT-savvy users. To fill this gap, we newly developed a graphical user interface (GUI)-based web application of molecular generative models, Molecule Generation Experience, that is open to the general public. This is the first web application of molecular generative models enabling users to work with built-in datasets to carry out molecular design. In this paper, we describe the background technology extended from our previous work. Our new online evaluation and structural filtering algorithms significantly improved the generation speed by 30 to 1,000 times with a wider structural variety, satisfying chemical stability and synthetic reality. We also describe in detail our Kubernetes-based scalable cloud architecture and user-oriented GUI that are necessary components to achieve a public service. Finally, we present actual use cases in industrial research to design new photoacid generators (PAGs) as well as release cases in educational events.