Accelerating Research and Engineering with AI
Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley | Melvin Calvin Laboratory, Berkeley 94720
Event Details
Submitted by the Event Organizer
Large language models are now increasingly used to accelerate many research and engineering activities, thanks to their broad world knowledge and ability to work with arbitrary data. They have had great success in programming and math, and are being applied to biology, chemistry, and many other areas. But what are the strengths and limitations of AI for these tasks, and how can we make it even better? Matei Zaharia will describe research from UC Berkeley and other groups on using AI for engineering and research, including algorithms that use AI to search for better solutions to a problem (e.g., GEPA, AlphaEvolve, and AdaEvolve), and results researchers have been getting with them in computer science, biology, and other areas. In general, AI can be trained and applied effectively when solutions are easy to verify, but it has a much harder time when they aren’t (e.g., in chemistry and biology, where experiments take days). We are also getting better, however, at translating more problems into the easy-to-verify setting. In this Theoretically Speaking public lecture, Zaharia will discuss where this might lead, based on the trends we are seeing so far, and how science and engineering might look in the future when we have highly effective, tireless AI coworkers to explore solutions for us.
Matei Zaharia is an Associate Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley and Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Databricks. He is best known as the originator of Apache Spark, one of the world’s most widely used frameworks for large-scale data processing, which he developed while pursuing his PhD at UC Berkeley. He has also contributed to numerous influential open-source systems for data management and artificial intelligence, including GEPA, Apache Mesos, MLflow, Delta Lake, and the DSPy framework for programming language models. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, he held faculty positions at MIT and Stanford. His achievements have been recognized with the ACM Prize in Computing, the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, the SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Light refreshments will be provided before the talk, starting at 4 p.m.
Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.
Cost: FREE*
