Center for Decoding the Universe Quarterly Forum
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The Center for Decoding the Universe brings together researchers across scientific disciplines to answer the biggest questions about our Universe by leveraging complex data with the most advanced computational methods. The Center’s second quarterly forum will focus on three data science and artificial intelligence topics that will help us answer these questions.
Agenda
| Time | Session | Speaker |
| 12:00 - 13:00 | Registration & Lunch | |
| 13:00 - 13:05 | Introduction and Welcome | Susan Clark & Risa Wechsler |
| 13:05 - 14:00 | Session 1: Discovery and Inference from Multi-Modal Data | |
| 13:05 - 13:25 | Automated model discovery for soft matter systems | Ellen Kuhl |
| 13:25 - 13:40 | Anomaly detection for ultra-rare event searches | Maria Elena Monzani |
| 13:40 - 13:50 | Encoding the nearby universe: a unified observational picture of galaxies across wavelength and scale | Dalya Baron |
| 13:50 - 14:00 | Representation Learning for Time-Domain High-Energy Astrophysics | Steven Dillmann |
| 14:00 - 14:20 | Break | |
| 14:20 - 15:15 | Session 2: Beyond 2D: The World Around Us and the Universe | |
| 14:20 - 14:40 | Understanding the 4D Visual World Through Object Intrinsics | Jiajun Wu |
| 14:40 - 14:55 | C4Universe: A Digital Twin Universe in 3D | Tom Abel |
| 14:55 - 15:05 | Reconstructing and Predicting 3D Fluid Dynamics from a Single Video | Koven Yu |
| 15:05 - 15:15 | Understanding Physical Dynamics with Counterfactual World Modeling | Rahul Mysore Venkatesh |
| 15:15 - 15:35 | Break | |
| 15:35 - 16:30 | Session 3: Agentic AI for Science | |
| 15:35 - 15:55 | AI Scientists for Discoveries | James Zou |
| 15:55 - 16:10 | The Sky Is No Longer the Limit: Advancing Discovery in Astronomy with AI | Jo Ciuca & Sandy Yuan |
| 16:10 - 16:20 | Interpretability for Scientific Language Models | Christine Ye |
| 16:20 - 16:30 | From Automation to Human-Agent Collaboration: Challenges and Opportunities | Yijia Shao |
| 16:30 - 17:00 | Roundtable Discussion | |
| 17:00 - 18:00 | Networking Reception |
The first session will explore forward modeling techniques that (i) incorporate constraints imposed by the laws of nature and (ii) use AI to learn about these laws. We will explore connections between 3D scene-rendering systems that perceive and reason about the physical world and a 3D digital twin of our universe, constructed from billions of 2D projected images.
Confirmed speakers: Jiajun Wu, Tom Abel
The second session will focus on discovery and inference from multi-modal data. It will connect the modeling of dynamic, living systems to the encoding of multi-wavelength observations of nearby galaxies collected through various telescopes.
Confirmed speakers: Ellen Kuhl, Dalya Baron
Finally, our Agentic AI for Science session will explore recent breakthroughs in large language models and multi-agent systems to accelerate scientific discovery, from hypothesis generation to experimental protein design. We will explore how these advances can drive innovation in astronomy, which has a strong culture of open data, open-access publications, and open-source tools.
Confirmed speakers: James Zou, Jo Ciuca, Sandy Yuan
Our inaugural forum took place in the fall of 2024. Read a summary and watch the talks.
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