Upcoming Event: NSF-Simons CosmicAI Hybrid Seminar Series

CosmicAI Hybrid Seminar Series

1. Dr. John Wu, 2. Dr. Ioana Ciuca, 1. Associate Astronomer and the Applied AI Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, 2. Interdisciplinary researcher in Astrophysics and Computer Science at Stanford

Abstract

Speaker 1: Short Stories of AI in, and for, Astronomy

 I will present a series of short vignettes exploring how AI is reshaping astronomical research. 1. (How) Do Astronomers Trust AI for Research? 2. Navigating the Cosmic Library 3. Whose Telescope Is It Anyway? 4. Hidden Mechanisms of Language Models in Astronomy Literature 5. Hidden Mechanisms of Vision Models in Galaxy Images 6. The Platonic Universe

Speaker 2: Cosmic Co-Discovery with AI

What does it take for AI to help us with our science? We explore this question through two lenses. First, I introduce ReplicationBench, a benchmark developed at the Center for Decoding the Universe @Stanford that tests whether AI agents can replicate peer-reviewed astrophysics papers end-to-end. Benchmarking frontier models on author-written tasks of varying difficulty, we find that even the best agents succeed less than 20% of the time, revealing systematic failure modes in how AI reasons about science. Second, through UniverseTBD, our interdisciplinary community working to democratize science through AI, I present our latest results on astronomical foundation models, showing that larger models converge toward shared representations regardless of architecture, suggesting the community could build on existing models rather than train from scratch. I close with an open invitation to help shape how AI transforms research.

Biography

Speaker 1.

 Dr. John Wu is an Associate Astronomer and the Applied AI Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, and he holds visiting affiliations at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Physics & Astronomy, and the Department of Computer Science. His research focuses on studying galaxies with multi-wavelength observations, machine learning, and interpretable artificial intelligence (AI) for scientific discovery. He was previously a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University, received his PhD in Physics from Rutgers University, and received a BSc in Physics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Speaker 2

I am an interdisciplinary researcher in Astrophysics and Computer Science at Stanford, coordinating the Frontier AI projects of the Center for Decoding the Universe to advance scientific discovery in Astrophysics. Together with Kartheik Iyer, I co-founded UniverseTBD, a global movement of explorers working to democratize science and help us understand the Universe.