CSE DSI Hosts Agenda-Setting NSF-Sponsored Workshop on AI-Enabled Scientific Revolution
The CSE Data Science Initiative hosted the 2nd NSF-Sponsored Workshop on the AI-Enabled Scientific Revolution on August 6, 2024, at McNamara Alumni Center. This workshop was a follow-up to the highly successful 2023 workshop that was held at NSF headquarters (with logistics support from CSE DSI). Both of these workshops were co-organized by Vipin Kumar, Regents Professor and Director of the CSE Data Science Initiative, and Aidong Zhang, Thomas M. Linville Professor of Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, and Data Science at the University of Virginia.
The second workshop aimed to explore the promise of Generative AI for accelerating scientific discoveries and driving the next frontiers in Generative AI that are driven by the unique needs of a diverse set of science and engineering disciplines. It brought together more than 30 leading experts from AI and various scientific and engineering fields including computational biology, health sciences, neuroscience, materials informatics, ecology, climate science, hydrology, limnology, and physics. The attendees came from a wide variety of disciplines and institutions (academia, industry, and federal mission-driven agencies), and about half of these had attended the first workshop.
U of M Vice President for Research Shashank Priya opened the workshop and welcomed the participants by noting the enthusiasm across Minnesota industries about the potential of AI to improve productivity and the investments the University has been making in AI and related fields.
The workshop program consisted of four sessions that alternated between lightning talks and panel discussions. Speakers discussed the current limitations of the existing approaches (e.g., hallucinations), ways to strengthen approaches, (e.g., by leveraging scientific theories), and how to build the next-generation ecosystem for generative AI innovations that are driven by the needs of the scientific community.
The workshop was also an opportunity for UMN faculty and graduate students to engage with prominent scholars from around the country and to hear the direction-setting discussion.
To see the breadth of topics addressed at the workshop, visit the workshop website. A report is currently being written and will be posted there when it is complete. The report from the first workshop from March 2023 on the workshop for the 1st NSF-Sponsored Workshop on the AI-Enabled Scientific Revolution.