The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory gathered more than 200 artificial intelligence experts and domain scientists for an AI expo exploring cutting edge artificial intelligence that’s making a difference for scientific research institutions around the world.
The lab’s AI Initiative, a program dedicated to advancing AI throughout the laboratory’s research portfolio, hosted the event for ORNL researchers and staff and featured keynote speeches, poster presentations and a mini hackathon session aimed at giving attendees hands-on experience with this evolving technology. ORNL hosted its first such event in 2019.
ORNL’s Director of Artificial Intelligence Programs Prasanna Balaprakash stressed the significance of having a large crowd of ORNL staff from diverse research backgrounds.
“This demonstrated the ORNL research community's commitment to leveraging AI’s transformative capabilities to advance science, engineering and national security,” said Balaprakash.
Attendees had an opportunity to work with some of the latest AI models — like OpenAI’s o1 and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet models — through the mini hackathon session. The event was also an opportunity to showcase ORNL’s AI capabilities, highlight AI-based science and engineering research and open the door to opportunities for collaboration between domain experts and AI experts across the lab.
This demonstrated the ORNL research community's commitment to leveraging AI’s transformative capabilities to advance science, engineering and national security.
Featured keynote speakers from within ORNL included Balaprakash; Deputy for Science and Technology Susan Hubbard, and Artificial Intelligence Programs Director Edmon Begoli. NVIDIA senior research scientist Jean Kossaifi and Amarda Shehu of George Mason University presented keynotes as well.
“Attending the AI Expo, I was reminded once more of the depth and quality of AI research happening at ORNL,” said Begoli, who serves as director of the Center for AI Security Research, or CAISER. “I’m continually impressed by the competence and dedication of our researchers.”
ORNL has a long history as a global leader in advancing AI, with research on the technology as early as 1979 with the launch of the Oak Ridge Applied Artificial Intelligence Project.
“AI is transitioning from its predictive and generative phases into a new era of reasoning, which we think will enable even more opportunities for AI to propel scientific discovery and innovation,” said Hubbard, who opened the event. “Because it is critical for ORNL to help lead this transition, we have taken several steps to support and galvanize our researchers. Examples include the ORNL AI initiative and exploration of a “scientific laboratory of the future” concept; development of an AI academy to raise awareness of new developments and to lead tutorials such as today; an AI governance committee focused on the proper and ethical use of AI across the lab; and ORNL’s recently released AI Assistant, powered by ChatGPT,” accessible to lab staff.
The event comes on the heels of the “1,000 scientist jam session,” a first-of-its-kind event held last month from nine national laboratories to test generative artificial intelligence models for their functionality in scientific research. Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright observed the event while on a visit to the lab, along with OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman, U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann and U.S. Sen. Bill Hagerty.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. — Mark Alewine
