Francisco Villaescusa, CCA
When
Where
Title: The Denario project: Deep knowledge AI agents for scientific discovery
Abstract: Science advances by formulating and testing hypotheses, collecting and analyzing data, and drawing conclusions—yet much of a scientist’s time is spent in tasks such as coding analyses, writing and revising text, reviewing the literature, and learning new concepts. Can recent advances in AI help reclaim some of that time? In this talk, I will show how large language models and AI agents may help scientists with these tasks. I will first describe what AI agents are and their applications in science. Next, I will present Denario, a complex, publicly available, multi-AI-agent system designed to function as a research assistant. Developed and evaluated by a diverse team of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers, Denario is an interdisciplinary tool capable of generating ideas, searching the literature, developing research plans, writing and executing code, crafting plots, drafting and reviewing scientific papers. To showcase its capabilities, I will conduct a live demonstration tasking the system with turning a dataset into ideas, codes, plots, and paper drafts in real time. I will then present and discuss some of the documents generated by Denario in disciplines such as astrophysics, biology, biophysics, biomedical informatics, chemistry, machine learning, material science, mathematical physics, medicine, neuroscience, planetary physics, and quantum physics. I’ll close by discussing how tools like Denario may help researchers accelerate scientific research and invite the audience to a broad discussion on the benefits and risks of this technology.
Bio: Francisco (Paco) Villaescusa-Navarro is a research scientist at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paco did his PhD in Valencia, Spain. After a postdoctoral position in Trieste, Italy, he was a Flatiron Research Fellow at the Flatiron Institute and research scholar at Princeton University. His previous work focused on developing tools to extract the maximum information from cosmological surveys. He is the main architect of the Quijote simulations and the main developer of the CAMELS, DREAMS, and Backlight simulations, a set of cosmological simulations spanning hundreds of thousands of different virtual universes requiring petabytes of data. More recently, he has been developing an agentic system for scientific discovery. Paco’s work has been highlighted in magazines such as The New Yorker and Quanta.
3:00 PM in PAS 201 / Zoom https://arizona.zoom.us/j/86395646910
Refreshments in PAS 236, 2:30PM