The speakers were well divided between industry and academia (and no one from a National Lab). The industry talks turned out to be equally as interesting as the academic ones. Sales pitches are not allowed, so the talks are typically focused on addressing an engineering problem or challenge without any superfluous information. Furthermore, the talks are designed to be either updates or works in progress (this is attributes for the large discussion aspect from the audience).
Two things that stood out for from these talks is the lack of microstructure characterization and discussion of crystal plasticity. It was a reminder that I was in a room of mostly mechanical engineers and not materials scientists. However during one of my side discussions with an engineer at Aleris, he expressed his surprise on just how things at the microscale influence the macroscale behavior. (Context: They found that special grain boundaries played a major role in crash-worthiness in aluminum. However I didn't get the chance to ask if these were Sigma3 boundaries or not, which would've been very interesting...).
My takeaway from all of this was the (micro)structure to property and performance relationships is equally important during forming/processing operations, and there is a large room for the development of these understandings.
