Mario Krenn (MPL Erlangen): Towards an artificial Muse for new ideas in Physics

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a potentially disruptive tool for physics and science in general. One crucial question is how this technology can contribute at a conceptual level to help acquire new scientific understanding or inspire new surprising ideas. I will talk about how AI can be used as an artificial muse in physics, which suggests surprising and unconventional ideas and techniques that the human scientist can interpret, understand and generalize to its fullest potential.

[1] Krenn, Kottmann, Tischler, Aspuru-Guzik, Conceptual understanding through efficient automated design of quantum optical experiments. Physical Review X 11(3), 031044 (2021).

[2] Krenn, Pollice, Guo, Aldeghi, Cervera-Lierta, Friederich, Gomes, Häse, Jinich, Nigam, Yao, Aspuru-Guzik, On scientific understanding with artificial intelligence. Nature Reviews Physics 4, 761–769 (2022).

[3] Krenn, Zeilinger, Predicting research trends with semantic and neural networks with an application in quantum physics. PNAS 117(4), 1910-1916 (2020).

[4] Krenn et al., Forecasting the future of artificial intelligence with machine learning-based link prediction in an exponentially growing knowledge network, Nature Machine Intelligence 5, 1326 (2023)