What does it take to build an AI scientist in chemistry that can carry out research and improve through experience? In this talk, I will explore scientific autonomy as a process of hill climbing: identifying the capabilities that limit autonomous research, addressing those gaps, and evaluating progress on increasingly demanding chemistry tasks.
\r\nDrawing on the El Agente family of systems, I will discuss how hierarchical teams of agents coordinate quantum chemistry workflows and how molecular structure generation addresses a critical gap between chemical reasoning and computational execution. I will consider how these capabilities could contribute to longer-term research goals, such as automated reaction pathway exploration. These examples illustrate how a single missing capability can interrupt an otherwise sophisticated research workflow.
\r\nI will also discuss the open challenge of enabling agents to learn continually from scientific literature, computational results, and failed attempts, and to acquire capabilities as new problems demand them. By examining current capabilities and remaining bottlenecks, I will outline a path toward AI systems that formulate and test chemical hypotheses with increasing independence.
How social robots look, behave, and offer support should reflect the people and environments they encounter. Drawing on studies with older adults in rural Indiana and urban Houston, this talk examines how individual needs, preferences, everyday surroundings, and care relationships can inform the physical forms and interaction styles of future social robots.
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\r\nThrough participatory design, observations, and interviews, I center older adults’ perspectives on meaningful support, acceptable interaction, and personal boundaries. Encounters with robot companions have brought moments of enjoyment, surprise, and support, while revealing challenges involving communication, expectations, privacy, and control. I explore how embodiment, movement, voice, and interaction pacing shape these experiences, and how caregivers can support engagement while preserving older adults’ choices and dignity.
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\r\nThese findings inform design requirements for robots that people can understand, guide, and adjust as their circumstances change. I connect them to opportunities for adaptive robot behavior, accessible interaction, and shared control, including how robots might recognize when assistance is welcome and make their actions easier to interpret or interrupt. The talk positions older adults as active contributors to robotics research, whose lived expertise can shape both future robot companions and the broader systems of support surrounding them.
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\r\nBiography
\r\nChorong Park, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and Presidential Frontier Faculty at the University of Houston’s Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design, where she leads the Empathetic Lifespan AI & Robotics for Aging (ELARA) Lab. Her research connects human–robot interaction, human-centered AI, and participatory design to develop social robots and supportive technologies with older adults and caregivers.
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\r\nDrawing on studies in rural Indiana and urban Houston, she investigates how robots’ physical forms and interactions can fit older adults’ needs, surroundings, and everyday lives. Her work centers older adults’ perspectives on companionship, support, privacy, personal boundaries, and dignity, including how caregiver involvement can preserve individual choice and control.
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\r\nHer research is informed by more than 500 hours of volunteer technology support with older adults and people with disabilities and has appeared at ACM CHI, ACM ASSETS, and IEEE robotics venues. She earned her Ph.D. in Technology, with a graduate minor in Gerontology, and her master’s degree in UX Design from Purdue University.
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\r\nFurther information:
\r\nUniversity of Houston research feature
\r\n(https://stories.uh.edu/2026-ai-robots-for-older-adults/index.html)
\r\nELARA Lab website
\r\n(https://elaralab.org/)
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Photonics Day is a yearly event that aims to promote research discussions and networking among members of the EPFL photonics community, as well as researchers and industry players in the photonics sector. The program includes invited talks from world leaders in the field, a thesis presentation by the winner of the Best EDPO distinction, a scientific picture contest organised by EPC, as well as presentations by students in the Doctoral Program in Photonics, who will compete in the 180-Second Thesis Competition.
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\r\nThis year the Photonics Day will take place on Thursday October 22, 2026 at the EPFL Forum Rolex.
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\r\nParticipation is free and includes lunch. Registration opens in September and is mandatory by October 12, 2026. You’ll find both the registration form and the full program on the same page.
In this talk, I'll take a look at three \"microbial vignettes\". In the first, I'll examine how the presence of co-habiting microbes profoundly affects the biology of a human pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa. This is important, because in diseased human airways - where P. aeruginosa is an unwelcome, but common inhabitant - the pathogen invariably shares the infection site with a variety of other microbes. It turns out that these microbial neighbours interact with one another and that these interactions are perturbed by the loss of a quorum sensing \"master regulator\" (LasR) in P. aeruginosa. In the second \"short\", I'll talk about how we are now able to manipulate the rate of evolution of the organism, either by \"stepping on the gas pedal\" or by \"slamming on the brakes\". The ability to do this, in an experimentally-controlled manner, is allowing us to access some novel evolutionary trajectories, and to address some truly fundamental biological questions. Finally, I'll take a fresh look at bacterial biofilms and in particular, examine whether the exopolysaccharide \"bioglue\" that holds these structures together might have additional - possibly more important roles. It turns out that it does, and that the exopolysaccharide matrix acts as a \"net\" to selectively sequester secreted proteins, potentially conferring novel functionalities on the biofilm.
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\r\nBrief Speaker Bio.
\r\nAfter reading for a degree in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, Martin completed a PhD on bacterial chemotaxis at the Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel), where he was awarded the Wolf Prize for his contributions to the field. Leavuing Israel with a PhD and a [German] wife, he then moved to Toulouse (supported by a long-term EMBO fellowship) where he learned the dark art of x-ray crystallography and solved the structure of a signaling complex involved in bacterial chemotaxis. He then moved back to the UK to take up a post-doctoral position at the University of Cambridge working on quorum sensing in the fascinating plant pathogen, Pectobacterium atrosepticum. There, he developed skills in molecular genetics and demonstrated (for the first time) that quorum sensing molecules bind directly to their cognate LuxR homologs in a range of bacteria. This advance allowed him to secure a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to start his own group - where he learned the hard way that prospective students don't like any project with the word \"plant\" in, and when offered projects on the plant pathogen versus a mammalian pathogen, always went for the latter. Since around 2000, his team's focus has been on understanding better the link between metabolism and virulence in the opportunistic human pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa. He is now Professor of Microbial Physiology and Metabolism at the University of Cambridge.
We discuss a class of graph embeddings into Minkowski space R^{2,2} = C^{1,1}, called t-surfaces, which arise in the study of the planar dimer model. A t-surface consists of a (perfect) t-embedding together with its associated origami map. Perfect t-embeddings were recently introduced as a key tool for proving that the gradient of the dimer height function converges to that of the Gaussian Free Field in a canonically associated metric, under suitable technical assumptions. After introducing the notion of a t-embedding, we will describe a construction of perfect t-embeddings for regular hexagons of the hexagonal lattice. In which the corresponding t-surfaces converge to space-like maximal surfaces in Minkowski space R^{2,1}. As a consequence, these constructions yield a new proof of convergence of fluctuations of the dimer height function to the Gaussian Free Field in the conformal structure induced by the limiting maximal surface.
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