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Evaluating LLMs and Agents for AI Driven Scientific Research

Series: Department Seminar

Speaker: Subhashini Venugopalan, Research Scientist, Google developing LLM agents

Date/Time: Jul 31 14:00:00

Location: CSA Auditorium, (Room No. 104, Ground Floor)

Abstract:
We are at the early stages of a fundamental shift, where new classes of AI tools have deep expertise in a range of domains and can autonomously generate solutions that match or sometimes exceed human-designed approaches. The application of such tools to scientific endeavors holds immense potential towards driving progress and discoveries. This talk will cover two aspects of a flywheel that can accelerate scientific research. One is the evaluation of the capabilities of such LLM and AI  models in handling the complexities inherent in scientific tasks. The second looks at an approach where an AI system can be guided to create expert-level solutions to complex scientific problems semi-autonomously to significantly save time and effort while still resulting in performance that compares or exceeds manually engineered ones. I will also share some examples of results of the system to diverse applications ranging from single cell RNA seq batch integration to CO2 monitoring and weather related modeling. 

Speaker Bio:
Subhashini Venugopalan is a Research Scientist at Google developing LLM agents with specialized capabilities for scientific discovery and automated coding. Her work centers on enabling models to reason over scientific data including multimodal data and complex codebases to significantly accelerate research workflows. Parallel to this, she leads research on evaluating video understanding and speech recognition to advance how multimodal models can make digital content accessible to diverse users. Subhashini is motivated by AIs potential to accelerate scientific breakthroughs and create assistive technologies that empower users. Her contributions to healthcare and accessibility were featured in the documentary Healed through A.I. and recognized with a 2025 Bronze Cannes Lions award for Transformative Design. Her publications can be found at https://vsubhashini.github.io/ and on Google scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TmWYBeEAAAAJ.

Host Faculty: Prof. Chaya Ganesh