Forget self-driving cars. The “look ma, no hands” era of autonomy has gone beyond the road and into the lab.
In the July issue of “Nature Machine Intelligence,” Northeastern University scientist Arun Bansil and his team present the AI X-ray scientist — an agentic model capable of setting up experiments and running them. Most importantly, it’s able to adapt its approach on the fly and change course when necessary.
The development serves as the first step in the so-called self-driving labs of the future, where scientists let AI do the gruntwork as the human experts focus on the big questions.
The project was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in collaboration with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) National Accelerator Laboratory, a DOE research facility that houses equipment scientists use to study quantum matter, substances with features that can’t be explained with classical physics.
Read more at Northeastern Global News
Illustration by Renee Zhang
