Andrew Connolly

Andrew Ferguson, Marisa LaFleur, Lars Ruthotto et al. · stanford

This community paper developed out of the NSF Workshop on the Future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Mathematical and Physics Sciences (MPS), which was held in March 2025 with the goal of understanding how the MPS domains (Astronomy, Chemistry, Materials Research, Mathematical Sciences, and Physics) can best capitalize on, and contribute to, the future of AI. We present here a summary and snapshot of the MPS community's perspective, as of Spring/Summer 2025, in a rapidly developing field. The link between AI and MPS is becoming increasingly inextricable; now is a crucial moment to strengthen the link between AI and Science by pursuing a strategy that proactively and thoughtfully leverages the potential of AI for scientific discovery and optimizes opportunities to impact the development of AI by applying concepts from fundamental science. To achieve this, we propose activities and strategic priorities that: (1) enable AI+MPS research in both directions; (2) build up an interdisciplinary community of AI+MPS researchers; and (3) foster education and workforce development in AI for MPS researchers and students. We conclude with a summary of suggested priorities for funding agencies, educational institutions, and individual researchers to help position the MPS community to be a leader in, and take full advantage of, the transformative potential of AI+MPS.

Parmita Mehta, Stephen Portillo, Magdalena Balazinska et al.

Deep learning (DL) models have achieved paradigm-changing performance in many fields with high dimensional data, such as images, audio, and text. However, the black-box nature of deep neural networks is a barrier not just to adoption in applications such as medical diagnosis, where interpretability is essential, but also impedes diagnosis of under performing models. The task of diagnosing or explaining DL models requires the computation of additional artifacts, such as activation values and gradients. These artifacts are large in volume, and their computation, storage, and querying raise significant data management challenges. In this paper, we articulate DL diagnosis as a data management problem, and we propose a general, yet representative, set of queries to evaluate systems that strive to support this new workload. We further develop a novel data sampling technique that produce approximate but accurate results for these model debugging queries. Our sampling technique utilizes the lower dimension representation learned by the DL model and focuses on model decision boundaries for the data in this lower dimensional space. We evaluate our techniques on one standard computer vision and one scientific data set and demonstrate that our sampling technique outperforms a variety of state-of-the-art alternatives in terms of query accuracy.