Ioana Ciucă (Stanford): AI+ Science Schmidt Fellows Speaker Series

Organized by the University of Chicago’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Agenda
4:00pm – 4:45pm:  Presentation
4:45pm – 5:00pm:  Q&A
5:00pm – 5:30pm: Reception

Meeting location
William Eckhardt Research Center. Room 401
5640 S Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
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Abstract: UniverseTBD is an interdisciplinary community of astronomers, AI researchers, engineers, artists and enthusiasts aligned on a bold mission to democratise Science for everyone. From releasing the first large language model in Astronomy, AstroLLaMA-1, to the AI-enabled literature discovery tool Pathfinder, and through our research with AstroPT and HypoGen, our team has pushed the boundaries of AI for Science for the past two years. In this talk, I discuss how UniverseTBD came to be, our vision, our values, and what drives us and has enabled us to scale our team projects in our commitment to sharing our learnings with the broader scientific community. I also discuss our latest results from hypothesis generation (HypoGen) to multimodal language models (AstroLlaVA-1) and agentic AI (AstroCoder). I conclude with a vision for the future where AI teams up with human researchers to “help us understand the Universe”.

Bio: Ioana Ciucă: I am an interdisciplinary researcher in Astrophysics and Computer Science at Stanford University, where I coordinate the Frontier AI Pillar of the Center for Decoding the Universe. My daily work involves developing AI models that advance our understanding of the Universe and push the boundaries of scientific research. As the co-founder of UniverseTBD, together with Kartheik Iyer (Columbia), I’m driven by the belief that scientific knowledge should be accessible to all. Our team democratises science by releasing AI tools and openly sharing our learnings and research as we explore this new technology for Science.

Parking
Campus North Parking
5505 S Ellis Ave
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