The CINEMA project is coordinated by Ikerbasque researcher at the UPV/EHU and POLYMAT Nicholas Ballard, together with UPV/EHU professor and scientific director of BERC POLYMAT José María Asua. It has received €2 million in funding from the European Commission through the Marie Sklodowska Curie programme.

The CINEMA project aims to revolutionise the design and production of polymeric materials using Artificial Intelligence, specifically machine learning techniques. The idea has been funded by the Marie Sklodowska Curie European programme of Horizon Europe, a network that supports the training and professional development of pre-doctoral researchers from around the world through their participation in collaborative projects that address current and future societal challenges.

The collaborative project led by POLYMAT and the University of the Basque Country, also involves a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the University of Ghent (Belgium), the BCAM - Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (Spain), the University of Ghent (Belgium), the BCAM - Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (Spain), Aachen University (Germany) and the University of Aachen (Germany) and the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom). In addition, the project is supported by four international companies: Synthomer GmbH (Germany), Arkema (France), BASF SE (Germany) and Covestro Resins B.V. (The Netherlands).

According to Nicholas Ballard, coordinator of the project, "In the field of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning has now become part of our daily lives and is used in a wide variety of applications. For example, they are included in entertainment, in recommendation systems that tell us which programmes we would like to watch, in traffic prediction systems that tell us how to get from A to B, and in text translations. However, in the chemical industry we have yet to learn how we can harness the immense predictive capabilities of machine learning. immense predictive capabilities of machine learning. Dr Ballard adds We at CINEMA have organised a consortium of world leaders in computer science and chemical engineering to chemical engineering with the goal of working to combine our specific chemical expertise with machine learning to specific chemical expertise with machine learning to help us design more efficient processes and products. design more efficient processes and products.

Nicholas Ballard holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Warwick (UK) and is an Ikerbasque researcher at POLYMAT. José M. Asua is Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Faculty of Chemistry at the University of the Basque Country/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea and scientific director of the Basque Centre of Excellence Center for Macromolecular Design and Engineering, POLYMAT Fundazioa.