WIM no. 17 Spring 2020

מכון ויצמן למדע Artificial intelligence: the future of smart AI is reshaping our lives—and revolutionizing science I n every branch of science, investigators are buckling under the weight of toomuch of a good thing: information. Fromparticle physics to genetics, and fromcell biology to environmental chemistry, new technologies are generatingmassive data sets, making the interpretation of experimental findings a significant challenge. Luckily, the emerging discipline of artificial intelligence is generating mathematical “thought partners” that can sift through this mountain of data, and reveal discoveries that would almost certainly be overlooked by the humanmind working alone. What is artificial intelligence, anyway? Artificial intelligence, or AI, is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines. When Marvin Minsky, the founder of MIT’s AI laboratory, advised Stanley Kubrick on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey—which featured an intelligent computer, HAL 9000—artificial intelligence was still the stuff of science fiction. But bit by bit (and byte by byte), research advances have propelled AI into the mainstream. From IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue, which faced off against human chess champion Garry Kasparov in the late 90s, to the robotic vehicles NASA landed on Mars in 2004, to today’s voice-activated “personal assistants” such as Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, or Amazon’s Alexa, society has entered into an evolving human-machine partnership for which the terms of the contract are still being written. Today’s “Big Data” revolution makes basic science related to artificial intelligence a matter of critical importance. A new $100 million flagship project at the Weizmann Institute, the Artificial Intelligence Enterprise for Scientific Discovery, will develop AI tools and ensure their integration into a range of scientific areas, while providing the massive computing power necessary to store, process, and analyze the data that will lead to the next big discoveries. AI is a broad concept used to described the solution, by a computer, of tasks for which human Weizmann MAGAZINE Science Feature