Vector Lecture Series - Anima Anandkumar

On Friday, May 10, 2024, Bren Professor at Caltech, Anima Anandkumar, visited the Vector Institute to give a talk on "AI Accelerating Scientific Understanding: Neural Operators for Learning on Function Spaces."
The Vector Distinguished Talk series is a formal gathering of academic and industrial data scientists across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) to discuss advanced topics in machine learning and its goal is to build a stronger machine learning community in Toronto.
Abstract:
Language models have been used for generating new ideas and hypotheses in scientific domains. For instance, language models could suggest new drugs or engineering designs. However, this is not sufficient to attack the hard part of science which is the physical experiments needed to validate the proposed ideas. This is because language models lack physical validity and the ability to internally simulate the processes. Traditional simulation methods are too slow and infeasible for complex processes observed in many scientific domains. We propose AI-based simulation methods that are 4-5 orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than traditional simulations. They are based on Neural Operators which learn mappings between function spaces, and have been successfully applied to weather forecasting, fluid dynamics, carbon capture and storage modeling, and optimized design of medical devices, yielding significant speedups and improvements.