Vladimir Lobaskin (University College Dublin) and Tassos Papadiamantis (University of Birmingham) attended the 2018 eSSENCE Multiscale Modelling Meeting (Ångström Laboratory, 11-13 June, Uppsala, Sweden). The meeting brought together researchers from computational chemistry, physics, biology, materials science and engineering traditionally to discuss the use of traditional physics-based models, and the current excitement about big data and machine learning in materials and molecular modelling, and about the opportunities that these approaches may bring.