ORNL seeks participants for a new Trustworthy AI for Science Essay Challenge; finalists and winners will be invited to present at the Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences and Engineering Conference (SMC) 2024.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is currently seeking researchers of all career stages to register by June 24 for an exciting new essay contest on AI and Science. This challenge urges participants to contemplate the guidance necessary to construct trustworthy, ethical, and useful AI systems for scientific purposes. The contest winners will be announced during SMC 2024.

“AI is completely changing the way that we do science,” said Prasanna Balaprakash, Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s AI Initiative director. “It’s transformative, but it is important to evaluate and develop these models in a much more systematic, rigorous, and responsible way that maximizes the potential while minimizing the risks. We challenge you to explore a future where artificial general intelligence, machine learning, and high-performance computing play a critical role in advancing the frontiers of science, engineering, and national security.”

To realize such a future, researchers require well-considered frameworks encompassing both scientific rigor and ethics to govern the use of AI for scientific purposes. We hope that  interdisciplinary teams will form to deliberate and write about this topic. We encourage submissions about questions of ethics and the use of AI for science and what these AI frameworks should consider and how they might operate. (Teams should allow themselves creative forays: poetry, thought experiments, dimension reduction analysis are all ok!)

We invite teams to submit thought-provoking responses to one of the following challenges in a 2000-word essay. Teams may consist of up to four members, and participation from diverse technical and humanistic viewpoints is strongly encouraged.