Aryan Deshwal wins NSF CAREER Award

Department of Computer Science & Engineering’s (CS&E) Assistant Professor Aryan Deshwal has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support his project, “Adaptive Experimental Design to Accelerate Scientific Discovery and Engineering Design.”

This prestigious award provides support to early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education, and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

“It’s definitely exciting,” Deshwal said. “My group works at the intersection of advancing AI methods and accelerating scientific discovery, and it’s a great time to be tackling these problems. It’s exciting to get this award because it will support lots of students working on these problems.” 

Deshwals' CAREER project looks at how artificial intelligence (AI) can accelerate scientific discovery through optimizing the process of choosing experiments and trials to run. The goal is to create AI methods that will help engineers and scientists decide which experiments to run next with fewer trials.

Deshwal explained that instead of scientists and engineers having to use the trial-and-error process when experimenting — which can be expensive and resource-consuming — an AI model could recommend specific trials with the best likelihood of success.  

“Testing out each possibility is very expensive,” Deshwal said. “So, my research focuses on the question of how can we figure out the best choice while minimizing the number of tests or experiments we do?”

He said the methods are broadly applicable. 

“They have been successfully applied in a wide variety of domains including materials design, hardware design, and additive manufacturing,” Deshwal said. “I am always actively looking for collaborators in other fields who can benefit from this type of technology.”

With the award, Deshwal has two main goals. 

“One goal is to work on important real-world scientific discovery, problems and develop new adaptive experimental design ideas,” Deshwal said. “The second, equally important goal, is to support students. I want them to become excellent scientists themselves, much better than me.”

Deshwal joined the Department of Computer Science & Engineering in 2024 as an assistant professor. Deshwal recently received the Innovative Deployed Application Award at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI) Conference. 

Reflecting on the award, Deshwal extends his gratitude to the department.

“I would like to thank my colleagues and collaborators for this award,” Deshwal said. “Most importantly, I’m thankful for my students who work with me and work on these problems.”

Learn more about Deshwal’s work at his personal website.