The SkAI Colloquia series features presentations from leading scholars and researchers working at the intersection of Astro and AI.

This SkAI Colloquium is co-sponsored by NU CS Department and NNCI as part of NNCI's Distinguished Speakers series.

Speaker: Anima Anandkumar

Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences,

Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Caltech

Talk title: Neural Operators: AI that understands the Physical World is essential for Scientific Discovery

Abstract:

Scientific progress is limited not by a lack of new ideas but by the time and cost involved in physical experimentation. Scientific discovery is a needle in the haystack problem: it does not help if AI gives you a vastly bigger haystack. Without knowing if any of the ideas work, an AI system that designs experiments just increases the effort required, since performing the experiments to validate the ideas is the real bottleneck.

AI's most transformative impact in enabling scientific discoveries lies in reducing the need for such experiments. To get there, we need to build AI models that are able to granularly simulate and understand physics at all scales, rather than just abstractly reason in the textual domain.

I will show how methods like Neural Operators are leading the way, and have been successfully applied in weather and climate modeling, plasma evolution in nuclear fusion, designing novel medical devices and accelerating quantum chemistry.