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NEW CENTER MERGES MATH, AI TO PUSH FRONTIERS OF SCIENCE


BY SYL KACAPYR
CORNELL ENGINEERING

July 7, 2023
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With artificial intelligence poised to assist in profound scientific discoveries
that will change the world, Cornell is leading a new $11.3 million center
focused on human-AI collaboration that uses mathematics as a common language.

The Scientific Artificial Intelligence Center, or SciAI Center, is being
launched with a grant from the Office of Naval Research and is led by
Christopher J. Earls, professor of civil and environmental engineering at
Cornell Engineering. Co-investigators include Nikolaos Bouklas, assistant
professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell Engineering; Anil
Damle, assistant professor of computer science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers
College of Computing and Information Science; and Alex Townsend, associate
professor of mathematics in the College of Arts and Sciences. All of the
investigators are field faculty members of the Center for Applied Mathematics.

With the advance of AI systems – built with tangled webs of algorithms and
trained on increasingly large sets of data – researchers fear AI’s inner
workings will provide little insight into its uncanny ability to recognize
patterns in data and make scientific predictions. Earls described it as a
situation at odds with true scientific discovery.

“Scientific theories are explanatory stories that offer mechanistic insights
into how the universe works,” Earls said. “These theories offer reasoning behind
what has been observed, but also, they predict that which has yet to be
observed. Such extrapolatory power is entirely beyond anything standard AI can
achieve. Our new center will pioneer radically new AI approaches for scientific
discovery.”

The SciAI Center will use mathematics as a common language between humans and
machines because, Townsend said, math is how scientists have modeled the world
for hundreds of years.

“Instead of getting AI to predict the future using data from a physical system,
we will get AI to speak in the language of calculus and derive the underlying
differential equations that govern a physical system,” Townsend said. “We are
trying to develop an AI-human collaboration that can become our science teacher,
revealing patterns of the natural world.”

The SciAI Center will have four intellectual thrusts – scientific data, operator
learning, closure models and complex systems. Its three application areas of
focus will be materials, turbulence and autonomy.

“By blending machine learning techniques with physics-informed algorithms, we
can accelerate computational methods to aid in the understanding of materials
and molecular systems,” said Damle, who added that Cornell’s fostering of
interdisciplinary research makes it a natural home for such a center, enabling
researchers from a broad set of areas to contribute.

Aside from its research goals, the center will be committed to helping
populations underrepresented in science and engineering gain access to emerging
AI tools through a series of student pathway programs that prepare young
researchers to work in new industries.

Other institutions participating include the United States Naval Academy; the
University of California, Santa Cruz; the California Institute of Technology;
the University of Cambridge; Brown University; the University of California,
Berkeley; and Integer Technologies.

Syl Kacapyr is associate director of marketing and communications for Cornell
Engineering.

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