The mythical centaur (half human, half horse) has become a metaphor for human-AI collaboration. In this talk, I explore what centaur science looks like at the intersection of artificial intelligence and fundamental physics.
I share adventures from both directions of this exchange: teaching machines to “think like a physicist” by incorporating physics principles into machine learning frameworks, and teaching physicists to “think like a machine” to maximize discovery opportunities in both experimental and theoretical physics.
Bio :
Jesse Thaler is a theoretical particle physicist who fuses techniques from quantum field theory and machine learning to address outstanding questions in fundamental physics. He joined the MIT Physics Department in 2010, and he is currently a Professor in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics – a Leinweber Institute. In 2020, he became the inaugural Director of the NSF Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions:https://iaifi.org.