ECE Seminar Series – April 17 (Fri.) @ 2:00pm: “Towards AI Co-Scientists: Agentic Foundation Models for Physical Universe,” Rose Yu, Assoc. Prof., CSE, UCSD

Location: Loma Pelona Center, Room 1108
DISTINGUISHED LECTURE at the ECE SEMINAR SERIES

Abstract

Despite the huge success of foundation models across fields, they still suffer from hallucinations and can produce physically inconsistent outputs. Towards the grand dream of building AI co-scientists, it is critical to integrate physical laws, scientific simulations and formal methods into the learning and reasoning of these models.  In this talk, I will discuss our on-going effort to develop agentic foundation models for physical sciences. I will demonstrate the use cases of our models on a variety of applications including earth science, epidemiology modeling, mathematics and physics.  

Bio

Dr. Rose Yu is an associate professor at the University of California San Diego, Department of Computer Science and Engineering. She earned her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences at USC in 2017. She was subsequently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech. Her research focuses on advancing machine learning techniques for large-scale spatiotemporal data analysis, with applications to sustainability, health, and physical sciences. A particular emphasis of her research is physics-guided AI which aims to integrate first principles with data-driven models. She is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE)- the highest honor given by the White House to early career scientists, DARPA Young Faculty Award, Army ECASE Award, NSF CAREER Award, Hellman Fellow, Faculty Research Award from JP Morgan, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Adobe, Several Best Paper Awards, Best Dissertation Award at USC. She was named as MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 in AI and Samsung AI researcher of the Year in 2025.

Hosted by: Distinguished Lecture at the ECE Seminar Series

Submitted by: Haewon Jeong <haewon@ece.ucsb.edu>