ML Seminar: Scientific Innovations in the Age of Generative AI

The UMN Machine Learning Seminar Series brings together faculty, students, and local industrial partners who are interested in the theoretical, computational, and applied aspects of machine learning, to pose problems, exchange ideas, and foster collaborations. The talks are every Tuesday from 11 a.m. - 12 p.m. during the Spring 2024 semester.

This week's speaker, James Zou (Stanford University), will be giving a talk titled "Scientific Innovations in the Age of Generative AI".

Abstract

This talk will explore how we can develop and use generative AI to help researchers and clinicians to enable scientific innovations. I will first discuss how we use AI to generate recipes for making and validating new drugs. Then I will present how we developed visual-language AI to help clinicians interpret histology images. Finally, I will discuss how we use large language models (LLM) to help all of us to write better papers. I will also discuss perspectives on what’s on the new horizon for generative AI. 

Biography

James Zou is an associate professor of Biomedical Data Science, CS and EE at Stanford University. He is also the faculty director of Stanford AI4Health. He works on both improving the foundations of ML–-by making models more trustworthy and reliable–-as well as in-depth scientific and clinical applications. Many of his innovations are widely used in tech and biotech industries. He has received a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, two Chan-Zuckerberg Investigator Awards, a Top Ten Clinical Achievement Award, several best paper awards, and faculty awards from Google, Amazon, Tencent and Adobe. His research has also been profiled in popular press including the NY Times, WSJ, and WIRED.