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Overview of the Solid State and Materials Chemistry Collaboration Incubator (SSMC-CI) series Our event begins with an in-person workshop (May 26-29, 2026) at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, during which multi-disciplinary teams will meet, formulate a ‘plan of attack’ for their respective problems, and launch these plans with a burst of activity. Researchers then return to their home institutions and the event continues online, with all teams convening together for once-weekly check-ins and to hear talks from workshop guest speakers. Teams continue working for the remainder of the summer, with the event culminating in a 2-day virtual workshop in mid-August 2026. By the end of the event, teams should have determined viability and future plans for their projects. Conference Topics of Interest Members of the SSMC community will be asked to submit research topics and problems to be tackled by a team at the SSMC-CI. These proposals will be reviewed by the organizers as participants are selected. Potential projects should have strong relevance to any of the sub-areas of solid state and materials chemistry, including organic, inorganic, or hybrid materials. Priority will be given to research questions for which (1) effectively processing large quantities of data is a limiting factor, (2) improvements in data analysis may lead to transformative insights and principles, and (3) an interdisciplinary approach is needed. Potential themes that these projections could include are: • New ways to leverage the massive data acquired through high-throughput calculations or beam-line experiments. • Explainable and interpretable machine-learned models, addressing the question of how scientific insight may be extracted from these models. • Featurization of geometrical information, crystallographic data, and microstructure data. • Image analysis and image segmentation. • Model deployment. Potential goals of such projects could be predictions of: • Rare phenomena and outliers. • Computationally expensive properties (defects, dopants, modulated and aperiodic structures). • Stability and properties of materials that pose challenges for standard DFT (f-electron systems, sparse matter, strong spin-orbit coupling, etc.). • Crystal structure and phase transitions. • Materials at extreme conditions/environments. • Synthesizability of and synthetic routes to metastable structures.