COLLOQUIUM: Tom Hope, "LLM Systems for Literature-Based Scientific Discovery"

Event Type

Seminar/Symposium

Sponsor

Siebel School of Computing and Data Science

Location

HYBRID: 2405 Siebel Center for Computer Science or online

Virtual

Join online

Date

Sep 10, 2025   2:00 pm  

Views

181

Originating Calendar

Siebel School Colloquium Series

Zoom: https://illinois.zoom.us/j/87358875024?pwd=5c2VcT6KLkYBMxg4IIIa2Ue3sncVfb.1

Refreshments Provided.

Abstract: 
There has been a recent surge of interest in LLM agents that propose new scientific ideas. In this talk, I will present recent work on AI models and systems that harness the scientific literature to help researchers identify inspirations and hypothesize directions grounded in literature. This includes (1) Scimon, which was the first work to explore LLMs for scientific hypothesis generation grounded in papers; (2) Scideator, our human-AI system for helping researchers interact with literature as a source of inspiration; and (3) CHIMERA, a dataset of scientific idea recombinations which can be used for training and evaluating systems that generate inspirations based on recombination of concepts from literature. As part of the talk, we will also discuss assessing and enhancing the novelty of scientific ideas.

Bio:
Tom Hope is a research scientist at The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and an assistant professor (senior lecturer) at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem's School of Computer Science and Engineering. Prior to that he was a postdoctoral researcher at AI2 and the University of Washington (UW), working with Daniel Weld and Eric Horvitz. His work has received five best paper awards, featured on the cover of The Communications of the ACM and received coverage from Nature and Science. Tom is the recipient of several competitive research awards, such as the Azrieli Early Career Faculty Fellowship which is given to eight scientists across all fields of study, and awards from IBM, eBay and IIA for a collaboration with psychiatric hospitals.

Part of the Siebel School Speakers Series. Faculty Host: Heng Ji

Meeting ID: 873 5887 5024 
Passcode: csillinois

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