Aims for the Symposium

Scientific discovery has intrigued AI researchers since the 1970s, but excitement about this topic has increased recently, with new contributors from physics, applied mathematics, and other fields joining the movement. Nevertheless, most efforts to date have focused on individual components of discovery. This was a reasonable initial strategy, but the time seems ripe to should move beyond these piecemeal efforts. The expanded agenda should combine not only different forms of discovery, but also other facets of science, including creation of measuring devices, design of controlled experiments, and communication of results.

The Fall Symposium on Integrated Approaches to Computational Scientific Discovery will offer a venue for reporting progress in this important and challenging area. We solicit submissions on topics that include, but are not limited, to:

• Closing the loop between hypothesis generation, experimental design, data collection, and model revision;
• Interleaving methods that define new variables and coordinate systems with ones that induce numeric equations and models;
• Integrating different facets of discovery, such as forming taxonomies, finding qualitative laws, and inducing numeric equations;
• Combining results extracted from the literature and regularities found in data to aid hypothesis generation; and
• Using language models to draft scientific papers that review prior work area, report new results, and discuss their import.

We also welcome submissions on human-machine teams whose members collaborate to achieve new scientific insights, which raises many of the same issues as the integration of automated systems. We hope that this audacious vision will attract not only AI developers whose work addresses the computational challenges of integrated discovery systems, but also:

• Researchers from biology, chemistry, ecology, materials science, physics, and psychology who want to leverage AI to aid their pursuits.
• Philosophers and historians of science who can offer insights into the interleaved character of the scientific process.
• Experts in human-computer interaction who can adapt their design principles to developing discovery systems that team with people.

Together, these participants will offer complementary perspectives on the different components of scientific discovery, how they can interact with each other effectively, and open issues that the community should address in future research.

Schedule and Submissions

The symposium will run two and a half days, from morning on Thursday, November 7, through midday on Saturday, November 9. The meeting will revolve around presentations that report system designs or implementations combining two or more components of scientific research, at least one handled by machine. The event will begin with invited talks that identify different components and examine their interaction in specific fields, along with reviews of previous integrated and human-machine discovery systems.

The remainder of the meeting will comprise presentations by research groups about recent progress on integration efforts, including both results with implemented systems and thoughtful proposals for new approaches or challenges. The symposium will organize sessions around different types of integration, not around methodological paradigms. Rather than focusing on algorithmic details of component algorithms, submissions to the symposium and presentations at the gathering should focus instead on:

• The different aspects of discovery being integrated;
• The inputs of each module and their representations;
• The outputs of each module and their representations;
• How the modules are combined into an integrated system;
• Functionalities the integrated discovery system supports;
• Any scientific results the integrated system has produced.

Structuring talks in this way should increase communication among researchers with different backgrounds and suggest principles of integration that move beyond specific paradigms. We will apply the same principle to talks on human-machine teaming, asking speakers to state clearly how people communicate with AI modules and vice versa.

Authors should submit abstracts of proposed talks through the AAAI Spring Symposium EasyChair site, along with one or two references and links to papers that are representative of the authors' work on computational discovery. Abstracts should be a full page in 11-point font and need not follow AAAI format.

Submissions are due Friday, August 23, 2024, AoE (Anywhere on Earth). The organizing committee will select abstracts for presentation that report integrated approaches to discovery, with preference given to ones that address the questions listed above. It will also favor research on systems that find laws or models that make contact with existing scientific theories, as well as ones whose findings are stated in established scientific formalisms.

Symposium Organizers

• Youngsoo Choi / Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory / choi15@llnl.gov / https://people.llnl.gov/choi15/
• Sašo Džeroski / Jozef Stefan Institute / saso.dzeroski@ijs.si / http://www-ai.ijs.si/SasoDzeroski/
• Ross King / Chalmers University of Technology / rossk@chalmers.se / https://www.chalmers.se/en/persons/rossk/
• Pat Langley / ISLE / patrick.w.langley@gmail.com / http://www.isle.org/~langley/

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