Conference: NSF Workshop on AI-Enabled Scientific Revolution

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to disrupt science by unlocking new approaches that enable scientific advances with far-reaching societal consequences. However, there are critical issues to be addressed as AI now relies on primarily on training systems based on big, labeled data corpora, which is not an option in all areas of science. This workshop will bring together leading researchers in AI and scientific domains to identify key challenges and opportunities to dramatically accelerate the AI for science revolution. The workshop will be focused on developing a vision and strategy for catalyzing the next-generation AI-enabled science. An AI-enabled fourth industrial revolution will be key to addressing the biggest global societal challenges (feeding the growing population without destroying the planet, improving human health, renewable energy, mitigating and managing climate change, and creating a sustainable and just society). Leadership in AI is also critical for the economic prosperity and wellbeing of our country (e.g., developing the industries and workforce of the future). This workshop will lead the discussion on a new frontier in AI, where novel AI frameworks will drive scientific inquiry, suggest novel experiments, elucidate new theories, and thus revolutionize the traditional discovery process across multiple scientific disciplines. It will identify limitations of the current state-of-the-art in AI for existing scientific grand challenge problems, and lay out the strategies for designing building blocks for translational use-inspired research that will have transformative and long-lasting scientific and societal impact. In particular, there is a tremendous opportunity for (1) advancing frontiers of AI that are driven by the unique needs of scientific problems, and (2) taking advances made in the context of specific scientific domains to many other domains. In addition, challenges unique to scientific problems also offer an opportunity to advance AI, leading to a virtuous cycle of fundamental AI research driving scientific discovery, and use-inspired challenges in scientific problems advancing the frontiers of AI. The workshop will help build a collaborative community of scholars and practitioners across scientific disciplines to explore a set of potential research themes that are foundational and translational. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.