2025 AI in Science and Engineering Symposium

The Michigan Institute for Data and AI in Society is excited to announce a call for “AI journeys” presentations for the upcoming 2025 AI in Research Symposium, our annual event dedicated to advancing the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in domain research to enable research breakthroughs. 

What “AI journeys” presentations are. “AI for domain research” is a prominent topic that has caught the attention of many academic researchers. However, this is still just an idea for most domain researchers; their initial effort to explore this idea faces many challenges. At the same time, we also need to explore how this idea is transforming how we do research and the role of human researchers, so that this idea will lead us not only to better and faster research, but also more creativity and fulfillment of human researchers. “AI journeys” are research stories that will help the campus research community learn how to develop and implement research ideas with AI in a wide range of domain research.

We invite domain scientists as well as AI experts to share with the audience their explorations of using AI to advance domain research. These presentations should not be standard research talks that focus on methodology and results; instead, they should focus on telling the audience “how the sausage is made.” We recommend that a presenter use one or more research projects as an example to walk the audience through:

• How they selected a significant domain research question
• How they decided that they should leverage AI and a particular AI method
• How they adopted AI in the project(s)
• How they ensured sufficient expertise, resources and collaboration
• Results (even if preliminary), successes and lessons learned. 

Each speaker may choose to highlight one or more of the following themes.

1. Speeding up Research. Applications of AI to streamline and accelerate the research process, such as AI-driven experimental design, optimization in scientific studies, and automation that enhances workflow efficiencies.
2. Expanding the Limit of the Human Researcher. Using AI to enable previously unimaginable research inquiries in fields such as materials science, biology, astrophysics, and more.
3. The Nature of Creativity in research. Exploring the interplay between AI and human creativity in research, the evolving role of AI as a “researcher” and the redefined responsibilities and contributions of human researchers in AI-driven discovery.
4. Trusting the AI Scientist. Ensuring rigor, ethical integrity, and validation of AI-driven research outcomes, including approaches to validation, grounding, aligning AI discoveries with human values, and issues of trust and ethical considerations in AI.

Presentation format: Each presentation will be 20 minutes, plus 10 minutes for Q&A. We especially welcome presentations from faculty members. Each presentation may feature one or multiple speakers.

Submission Instructions: 

• At least one author/presenter should have a U-M affiliation.
• Please do not include figures, tables or bibliography in the abstract.  
• Each submission should include:
  • A title, list of authors/presenters and their affiliations. 
  • The theme(s) that best aligns with the presentation. Note that the organizers may assign you to a different theme.
  • An abstract (up to 300 words), including the following:
    • Overview of a domain research question
    • Considerations that went into selecting an AI method (or multiple methods) to address the question
    • Approaches to build collaboration, secure expertise and resources
    • The process of implementing the project
    • Outcomes and lessons learned

Timelines

Proposals should be submitted by Jan. 10, 2025. 

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by Jan. 24, 2025.

For questions or more details, please contact Ben Surgalski (surgalsb@umich.edu).

We look forward to receiving your submission and welcoming you to an enriching exploration of AI’s transformative impact on research.