Class scheduled as CMSC 35370 for Autumn 2025. Please contact Ian Foster with any questions.
Please see this draft curriculum.
An agentic Scientific Discovery Platform (SDP) is an integrated environment that combines reasoning-capable AI with scientific and engineering resources—such as literature collections, simulation codes, experimental platforms, and knowledge bases—to accelerate the pace of discovery. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and related technologies make it possible to build such platforms that can automate key aspects of scientific work: synthesizing information from the literature, generating and prioritizing hypotheses, designing and executing protocols, running simulations or experiments, and interpreting results.
To explore and advance these ideas, we are offering this intensive class in Fall 2025. The course is targeted at graduate students and advanced undergraduates eager to engage with this emerging field, but we also welcome postdocs, scientists, and faculty who are prepared to participate actively. The class emphasizes “learning by doing”: instructors will provide infrastructure, working examples, and state-of-the-art perspectives on agentic AI and scientific discovery, while students will design, build, and apply their own SDPs to tackle domain-relevant problems.
We welcome as participants both computer scientists, who may be most interested in how to build such platforms, and domain scientists, who may be most interested in how to apply them. Our aim is to create a mutually instructive environment in which diverse expertise contributes to advancing the science and practice of agentic discovery.
The class will take place at the University of Chicago during the Autumn Quarter 2025, i.e., starting September 29, 2025, as CMSC 35370-1: AI Agents for Science.
- Schedule: Mondays & Wednesdays, 3:00pm-4:20pm, room TBA
- Start Date: Monday, Sept 29, 2025
- End Date: Wednesday, Dec 10, 2025 (Final Class Meeting: Capstone Presentations)
- No Class: Week of Nov 24 (Thanksgiving); Monday, Dec 8 (College Reading Period)
We will have weekly assignments and a project. We will arrange access to AI models and compute and storage.