The UiO Science Library hosted the 2024 Exploring System Dynamics in the Natural World with AI conference this week. This conference brought together academic researchers, industry scientists, and others from Europe, the United States, and Norway to discuss how and why artificial intelligence (AI) is capable of understanding complex and often chaotic systems found in the natural world. Researchers presented on a wide variety of topics such as understanding low and high dimensional complex systems, new methods for examining complex systems with neural networks and AI, as well as industrial and educational problems.
A central goal was to encourage diversity and collaboration between different disciplines, all through AI/ML practice, and to identify new connections between applications in fields, from networks to earthquakes, and turbulence to chaos.
“Oftentimes when you go to an existing conference, you are joining an established network of scientists and you have a good understanding of what will be discussed. My goal for this conference was to bring together a whole bunch of people who didn’t know each other and see what happens,” Aiken commented Monday.
The conference included a number of industrial researchers from companies like Nvidia, Statkraft, and Expert Analytics. A central theme presented across the conference was that the speed at which theory and development occurs in AI, is transmitted at different speeds into different sectors such as energy and education. Several researchers associated with UiO including professor of physics, Anders Malthe-Sørenssen, who presented on Tuesday about the discovery of frictional properties of materials using diffusion models, a modern type of neural network common in image generator models such as Stable Diffusion.
Keynote lecturers included:
Anders Malthe-Sørenssen, Department of Physics and the Njord Centre, University of Oslo
Caterina De Bacco, MPI for Intelligent Systems, University of Tübingen
Ching-Yao Lai, Geophysics and Computational Engineering, Stanford
Danny Caballero, Physics and Computational Math, Michigan State University
Felix Kohler, Expert Analytics
Joachim Mathiesen, Niels Bohr Institute and the Njord Centre, University of Oslo
Karianne Bergen, Data, Earth, and Computer Science, Brown University
Nikola Kovachki, Nvidia, NYU
Omar Ghattas, Oden Institute, The University of Texas at Austin
Pia Zacharias, Statkraft
William Gilpin, Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Austin
There was a mix of lectures, poster presentations, and open discussions.
You can find some of the talks by visiting the UiO Science Library You tube channel:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6zSfYNSRHalAsgIjHHsttpYfxJ_XIPbt&si=fHLAF54VA8i8KMqX