Events Calendar

AI Seminar

Speaker: Ross King and Larisa Soldatova, University of Manchester and University of London

Talk Title: Automating Chemistry and Biology using Robot Scientists and On the representation of research hypotheses

Abstract: Automating Chemistry and Biology using Robot Scientists

Abstract
A Robot Scientist is a physically implemented robotic system that applies techniques from artificial intelligence to execute cycles of automated scientific experimentation. A Robot Scientist can automatically execute cycles of hypothesis formation, selection of efficient experiments to discriminate between hypotheses, execution of experiments using laboratory automation equipment, and analysis of results. The goal is to better understand science, and to make scientific research more efficient. The Robot Scientist Adam was the first machine to autonomously discover novel scientific knowledge. To describe Adam's research we developed an ontology and logical language. More recently we have developed the Robot Scientist Eve to automate and integrate drug discovery: drug screening, hit conformation, and QSAR development. Our focus has been on neglected tropical disease, and Eve has discovered lead compounds for malaria, Chagas, and African sleeping sickness.

Title: On the representation of research hypotheses

Speaker: Dr Larisa Soldatova

Abstract:
Hypotheses are at the heart of scientific research workflows. Many hypotheses are now being automatically produced on an industrial scale by computers, e.g. the annotation of a genome is essentially a large set of hypotheses generated by sequence similarity programs; Robot Scientists enable the full automation of a scientific investigation, including generation and testing of research hypotheses.
In her talk, Larisa will present a logically defined way for recording automatically generated hypotheses in machine amenable way. The proposed formalism allows the description of complete hypotheses sets as specified input and output for scientific investigations. This formalism can also be applied for the representation of hypotheses formulated by human scientists.



Biography: Ross D. King is Professor of Machine Intelligence at the University of Manchester, UK. His main research interests are in the interface between computer science and biology or chemistry. The research achievement he is most proud of is originating the idea of a Robot Scientist using laboratory robotics to physically implement a closed-loop scientific discovery system. His Robot Scientist Adam was the first machine to hypothesize and experimentally confirm scientific knowledge. His new robot Eve is searching for drugs against neglected tropical diseases. His work on this subject has been published in the top scientific journals, Science and Nature, and has received wide publicity. He is also very interested in NP problems, computational economics, and computational aesthetics.

Bio:
Dr Larisa Soldatova is Senior Lecturer in Computing at Brunel University London. Her main research interests are in the knowledge representation, semantic technologies, and logics. Larisa has been involved in the Robot Scientist project for over 10 years. Now she leads a European project AdaLab that aims to develop a framework enabling robotic and human scientists to work together. The results of her work are published in Science, Nature Biotechnology, J. of the Royal Society Interface.


Host: Gully Burns

Location: 11th floor large conference room

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Kary LAU