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Inaugural AI in Science Symposium Features Global Thought Leaders

 

Presentation slide with Stephan Mandt at the AI in Science Symposium.
Stephan Mandt, AI in Science Institute associate director and ICS associate professor of computer science and statistics, presents at the inaugural AI in Science Symposium.

Leaders in artificial intelligence (AI) research gathered for the inaugural AI in Science Symposium at UC Irvine’s CalIT2 auditorium January 30, 2026. Sponsored by the UC Irvine AI in Science Institute (AISI), the all-day event attracted speakers from around the nation and the world.

Over 300 participants attended the sold-out event. They enjoyed featured speakers discussing AI Foundations, AI + Physical Science, AI + Life Science and AI + Society as well as a reception concluding the day.

Presenter and the crowd at the AI in Science Symposium.
Theofanis Karaletsos, head of AI Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, speaks to more than 300 participants at the inaugural AI in Science Symposium.

Presentation highlights included:

  • “Towards AI Co-Scientist: Agentic Foundation Models for Physical Sciences” with Rose Yu, associate professor of computer science and engineering, UC San Diego and Amazon Scholar
  • “Foundational Methods for Foundation Models for Scientific Machine Learning” with Michael Mahoney, professor of statistics, UC Berkeley and director of Big Data Research, International Computer Science Institute
  • “Generative Diffusion Models for Scientific Discovery” with Stephan Mandt, associate professor of computer science and statistics, ICS, and associate director, AI in Science Institute, UC Irvine
  • “Advances in AI for Weather and Climate Science” with Mike Pritchard, director of Climate Simulation, NVIDIA Research and professor of earth system sciences, UC Irvine
  • “Neural Operator Function Embedding for Climate Data Visualisation” with Robert Jenssen, professor in UiT Machine Learning Group, The Arctic University of Norway and director, Visual Intelligence
  • “Generative AI for Cell Biology” with Theofanis Karaletsos, Head of AI Science, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
  • “Supervised Contrastive Block Disentanglement to Preserve Biological Signals” with Kyunghyun Cho, Glen de Vries Professor of Health Statistics and professor of computer science, New York University
  • “From Pixels to Cells: Advancing Diffusion Models for Biomedical Data” with Jakub Tomczak, associate professor and PI of the Generative AI Group, Eindhoven University of Technology and principal researcher, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
  • “AI for Analysis of Life-Long Trajectories of Multimorbidity” with Søren Brunak, professor of public health and health data science section head and AI, University of Copenhagen
  • “AI Challenges (and Opportunities)” with Pierre Baldi, director, AI in Science Institute and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, ICS, UC Irvine
Pierre Baldi talking with ICS Dean Marios Papaefthymiou and two other attendees.
Pierre Baldi, AISI director and ICS Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, talks with ICS Dean Marios Papaefthymiou and two other attendees at the AI in Science Symposium.

Baldi said, “These are very special times for Artificial Intelligence, and the AISI inaugural symposium was a great success. We had a roster of outstanding speakers who gave thought-provoking talks in the three main focus areas of the AISI: (1) AI for Science; (2) Science for AI; and (3) AI and society. It was very well attended with broad participation from the different schools on campus, as well as from outside participants from the local community and from neighboring UC campuses. We are grateful for the sponsorship provided by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and plans for next year’s AISI symposium have already started.”

Michael Mahony speaks with AI in Science Symposium attendees.
Michael Mahony, UC Berkeley professor of statistics and director of Big Data Research  at the International Computer Science Institute, speaks with AI in Science Symposium attendees.

AISI’s primary mission is to promote and execute AI research, focusing on the applications of AI across all sciences, as well as the foundational mathematical and algorithmic underpinnings of AI. AISI is also committed to advancing research on the societal impacts and safety aspects of AI.

Pierre Baldi, Professor Mike Carey, and Jaime Aclander playing music at the AI in Science Symposium.
Symposium attendees enjoyed musical entertainment by Pierre Baldi, AISI director and ICS professor; Jaime Aclander; and Michael Carey, ICS professor emeritus. Photo courtesy of Pierre Baldi.

– Tonya Becerra

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