AI for Science

Transforming Science and Engineering to Solve Humankind’s Biggest Challenges

Complicated challenges like chronic disease, food security and climate change can’t wait for science as usual.

Carnegie Mellon University is reshaping the future of science by pairing human expertise with safe and trustworthy AI, computation and automated laboratories to revolutionize the way researchers work.

By connecting breakthrough technologies across the physical and virtual worlds — using automated laboratories, powerful foundation AI and physics-based models driven by high-performance computing and multimodal data resources — scientists can solve problems that were previously too complex to tackle.

Advancing AI capabilities in science and engineering not only accelerates the pace of innovation, it makes breakthroughs possible that could have never happened before AI became a partner in human discovery and data analysis.
Theresa Mayer
Vice President for Research

AI Science Foundry: Shaping the Future of Scientific Progress

Carnegie Mellon’s AI Science Foundry, a unique collection of AI-enabled autonomous laboratories, is revolutionizing the future of scientific innovation.

The AI Science Foundry brings together AI, automation, robotics and computational workflows with large-scale computing, data storage and experimental programmable cloud lab facilities in chemistry, biology and hard materials.

These work in concert, allowing researchers and engineers from campus or across the nation to remotely design and deploy autonomous science experiments to collect and analyze data.

For example, when a scientist launches their inquiry, AI agents design and manage experiments, then comb vast repositories of data that no human can totally comprehend. As they analyze data, they perceive correlations and causality that scientists might not recognize. Programmable robots traverse the aisles carrying samples from one instrument to another.

By making high-tech science more accessible, efficient and collaborative, Carnegie Mellon University’s AI Science Foundry can drive scientific innovation and transformative societal impact at a pace far faster than at any other time in human history.

Explore More

Visit the AI Science Foundry website to learn about how Carnegie Mellon University is shortening the impact-to-innovation pipeline from years to months.

Contact Us

Reach out to our team to learn more about how to engage with the AI Science Foundry via AIScienceFoundry@cmu.edu.

The Scientific Process Reimagined

By harnessing its strengths in responsible AI, automated technologies, machine learning and the sciences, CMU is transforming each part of the scientific process: rapidly conducting background research, identifying creative new hypotheses, accelerating experimentation and then leveraging vast amounts of multimodal data to inform the next experiment.

CMU scientists have demonstrated that AI systems can autonomously plan, design and execute within minutes a chemical reaction so complex it earned its human inventors a Nobel Prize in 2010.

Three scientists huddled around a monitor, discussing AI-driven data on the screen and a physical report.

Trustworthy AI, Transformative Collaboration

AI for Science enables trustworthy and transparent collaboration among researchers across existing and still-undiscovered disciplines, particularly those at the intersection of biology, chemistry, physics, materials, computer science and engineering.

By using data from diverse sources, multidisciplinary knowledge can be applied to a wide range of scientific and engineering problems, connecting previously disparate fields into something greater than the sum of their parts.