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SUMMARY:Toward an AI Scientist in Chemistry: Closing the Gaps in Scientifi
 c Autonomy
DTSTART:20261006T151500
DTEND:20261006T161500
DTSTAMP:20261001T161623Z
UID:c4ff3db52b4fe44082974ed84713946ba23653f0319dfd54430805a2
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Yunheng (Jackie) Zou\nWhat does it take to build an AI scienti
 st in chemistry that can carry out research and improve through experience
 ? In this talk\, I will explore scientific autonomy as a process of hill c
 limbing: identifying the capabilities that limit autonomous research\, add
 ressing those gaps\, and evaluating progress on increasingly demanding che
 mistry tasks.\nDrawing on the El Agente family of systems\, I will discuss
  how hierarchical teams of agents coordinate quantum chemistry workflows a
 nd how molecular structure generation addresses a critical gap between che
 mical reasoning and computational execution. I will consider how these cap
 abilities could contribute to longer-term research goals\, such as automat
 ed reaction pathway exploration. These examples illustrate how a single mi
 ssing capability can interrupt an otherwise sophisticated research workflo
 w.\nI will also discuss the open challenge of enabling agents to learn con
 tinually from scientific literature\, computational results\, and failed a
 ttempts\, and to acquire capabilities as new problems demand them. By exam
 ining current capabilities and remaining bottlenecks\, I will outline a pa
 th toward AI systems that formulate and test chemical hypotheses with incr
 easing independence.
LOCATION:https://epfl.zoom.us/j/68447908297?pwd=OU5JUGJUSUhZc0ZNYjQ2WENvYI
 NRdz09
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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