Special Topics in Information Science: Accelerating Science with AI

Large language models (LLMs) and generative AI are rapidly transforming the nature of work, including how research is performed. In the sciences, for example, AI is being increasingly applied to accelerate, assist and automate the full lifecycle of traditionally manual scientific processes: ideation and hypothesis generation, literature discovery and synthesis, experimental design and execution, results analysis, and writing of findings. In this research seminar, we will dive in to explore how AI tools are changing the research enterprise. In addition to reading about developments at the forefront of scientific advancement, students will get hands-on experience both trying out public AI tools for research and conducting their own research projects using these tools. Interested students will have the opportunity to go beyond merely using such tools in research to contributing themselves to the advancing this new frontier of theory, methods, and applications of AI tools to accelerate, assist, and automate the future research enterprise.