AI in the Spotlight

Artificial Intelligence (AI) was celebrated at ICTP on Thursday, 10 July, with two events that highlighted its transformative impact on both cutting-edge research and society at large.

The day began with a ceremony marking the first ICTP-IBM Brahmagupta AI Prize for Early Career Scientists, and continued with an AI Alliance Meetup, Italy’s first ever event of this kind, organized in collaboration with the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA).

Both events were made possible by a collaboration with IBM that includes various joint initiatives on both AI and quantum computing. “We are very proud to partner with a major corporation like IBM, which is itself at the very frontiers of research,” said ICTP director Atish Dabholkar in his welcome remarks at the prize ceremony. Announced in May 2024, the prize is part of a five-year collaboration that also includes the "Advanced School on Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery," an eight-day advanced training activity of which the ceremony was a part.

At the ceremony, Claudio Arezzo, head of the ICTP Mathematics section, gave a captivating presentation about the legacy of Indian mathematician and astronomer Brahmagupta, for whom the prize is named. Arezzo highlighted the scientist’s most important contributions—which go well beyond the introduction of zero as a number, to encompass the definition of rational numbers as a field. Despite the major advancements he brought to mathematics, Brahmagupta is relatively unknown. By naming the prize after him, ICTP and IBM intend to draw attention to overlooked aspects of the history of science and emphasize that, in the words of ICTP founder Abdus Salam, scientific discovery is a shared human heritage.

The award went to Simon Olsson of Chalmers University, who gave an overview of the work that earned him the Brahmagupta AI Prize, explaining how he and his team have been using AI to enhance classical molecular dynamics simulations and achieve a 100,000-fold improvement in speed. “I am very proud to be receiving this award. I think it’s a recognition not only of my own work, but also of that of my collaborators and the broader field of AI for simulations,” said Olsson. “This is apt because AI for simulations is one of the first areas where scientists adopted these technologies.”

Olsson’s talk was followed by a keynote on the future of scientific discovery by Alessandro Curioni, IBM Fellow, Vice President of IBM Europe and Africa and Director of the IBM Research Lab in Zurich, Switzerland. “In the same way as Brahmagupta’s zero has changed the way we think, so AI and quantum computing are reshaping our representation of the world and reducing its complexity in ways that were unthinkable until now,” he commented as he explained how these technologies are ushering in a new era of accelerated discovery. Curioni closed his talk by stressing the importance of ensuring that these transformative changes are guided by ethical principles.

This is precisely the mission of the AI Alliance, a global network of companies and scientific organizations around the world that are working on AI and have joined forces around IBM and Meta to make these technologies as open as possible. As a founding member of the AI Alliance, ICTP hosted the event “AI 4 Science and Society”, the first Italian AI Alliance Meetup, organized in partnership with SISSA, which also joined the Alliance recently.

“Through a network of 200,000 scientists worldwide, ICTP can help democratize access to cutting-edge AI knowledge and applications, in alignment with the AI Alliance’s mission,” said Serafina Di Gioia, a researcher in applied machine learning and high-performance computing at ICTP and a member of the new International Consortium for Scientific Computing (ICOMP), who was among the event organizers. “Both at ICTP and at SISSA, we strongly believe that open-source AI is the only way to develop an ethical AI for science, and we hope that this event will strengthen our role in the AI Alliance and deepen our engagement in the initiative,” she concluded.

With interesting talks on frontier AI applications for science, a thought-provoking panel discussion on AI and society which touched upon ethics and how AI is affecting our relationships, the event was a unique opportunity to explore the world of AI, and connect with its thriving community.

The prize ceremony and the AI Alliance Meetup were part of two major scientific events, the "Advanced School on Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery," organized in partnership with IBM, and the Workshop "Youth in High-Dimensions: Recent Progress in Machine Learning, High-Dimensional Statistics and Inference".