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MIT engineers developed AI frameworks to identify evidence-driven hypotheses that could advance biologically inspired materials.
Copyright: news.mit.edu – “Need a Research Hypothesis? Ask AI.”
Crafting a unique and promising research hypothesis is a fundamental skill for any scientist. It can also be time consuming: New PhD candidates might spend the first year of their program trying to decide exactly what to explore in their experiments. What if artificial intelligence could help?
MIT researchers have created a way to autonomously generate and evaluate promising research hypotheses across fields, through human-AI collaboration. In a new paper, they describe how they used this framework to create evidence-driven hypotheses that align with unmet research needs in the field of biologically inspired materials.
Published Wednesday in Advanced Materials, the study was co-authored by Alireza Ghafarollahi, a postdoc in the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM), and Markus Buehler, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering in MIT’s departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Mechanical Engineering and director of LAMM.
The framework, which the researchers call SciAgents, consists of multiple AI agents, each with specific capabilities and access to data, that leverage “graph reasoning” methods, where AI models utilize a knowledge graph that organizes and defines relationships between diverse scientific concepts. The multi-agent approach mimics the way biological systems organize themselves as groups of elementary building blocks. Buehler notes that this “divide and conquer” principle is a prominent paradigm in biology at many levels, from materials to swarms of insects to civilizations — all examples where the total intelligence is much greater than the sum of individuals’ abilities.
“By using multiple AI agents, we’re trying to simulate the process by which communities of scientists make discoveries,” says Buehler. “At MIT, we do that by having a bunch of people with different backgrounds working together and bumping into each other at coffee shops or in MIT’s Infinite Corridor.”[…]
Read more: www.news.mit.edu
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