Artificial Researchers and Scientific Discoveries

Humanity faces grand challenges, and the hope is that scientific progress will provide us with inventions, innovations, and breakthroughs that help us meet those challenges. Scientific progress, in turn, depends crucially on scientific discoveries. Now, in light of the rapid advances we are seeing in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) all around us, the question arises as to how AI can contribute to new scientific discoveries, or even make them on its own. Could there even be AI researchers – and what should that mean?

This is the overarching question of the Artificial Researchers and Scientific Discoveries conference, which gathers experts from a variety of backgrounds to explore further questions such as the following: What role might AI play in scientific discovery? Could AI find something on its own and communicate the results of its research? What about its creative capabilities? Could AI meet the criteria for authorship, and how could AI contribute to science communication? Could it make suggestions for science policy?

In short, this conference is about identifying and also evaluating different requirements, possibilities, and limitations for AI researchers and AI in scientific discovery.