Dr. DeBlasio will be giving a talk titled “Building an Automated Scientist: Three stories of accelerating scientific discovery” in the Computer Science Department Seminar Series at New Mexico Tech (New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology) in Socorro, NM on Monday, 26 September 2022 at 5:30 pm. The slide deck used is attached below. This talk will discuss several of the major projects currently happening in the group and the background from Dr. DeBlasio’s previous work that is relevant. The abstract is also below the fold.
Modern science has become much more reliant on computational tools. In order to make discoveries users must not only choose the proper tool, but also configure it correctly. The task of reconfiguring existing tools for specific inputs is both time-consuming and fraught with potential for introducing new errors to downstream analysis. This is why most domain users rely on the default configuration provided by the developers. These defaults are typically configured to work well on the average input, but the most interesting problems are rarely “average”. This configuration is done after choosing a tool to use, which in many cases is a tradeoff between quality and running time. In this talk we will discuss three approaches our group is taking to improve the tools used by domain scientists to make discoveries. The first approach is to help make automatic configuration choices using a method we call Parameter Advising, a second improves the running time of tools by implementing a more efficient solution to an existing method called Minimizer Schemes, and finally we will talk about replacing manually created mathematical models with trained neural networks.