PHYS/ASTR Colloquium: "The Vision We Choose: Towards Human-AI Co-discovery" - Dr. Ioana Ciucă (Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University)

San Francisco State University
Physics & Astronomy Colloquium Series
Monday, May 12, 2025
SEIC 210, 3:30 PM

"The Vision We Choose: Towards Human-AI Co-discovery"

Dr. Ioana Ciucă (Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University)

In this talk, I discuss a possible vision for the future where AI teams up with human researchers to "help us understand the Universe" seen through the lens of extensive collaborative human efforts such as UniverseTBD. UniverseTBD is an interdisciplinary community of astronomers, AI researchers, engineers, artists and enthusiasts aligned on a bold mission to democratize 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, our team has pushed the boundaries of AI for Science for the past two years. 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 further discuss our latest results from hypothesis generation and agentic AI. I conclude by discussing where we go from here and the role of active community participation.

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