November 4th (Tuesday) from 14:00 to 15:00.
Prof. Ross King
Department of Computer Science
University of Wales Aberystwyth.
"The Robot Scientist Project"
NII, 20F, Room 2006 (Seminar Room 1)
The trend in science is towards the ever greater use of computers to automate and analyse experiments. Robot Scientists advance this development. A Robot Scientist is an AI system that is capable of automatically: originating hypotheses to explain data, devising experiments to test these hypotheses, physically running these experiments using a laboratory robot, interpreting the results, and then repeating the cycle. Robot Scientists have the potential to both increase the productivity of science by enabling the high-throughput testing of hypotheses, and to improve the repeatability and reuse of scientific knowledge by enabling the description of experiments in greater detail and semantic clarity. We report the development of the Robot Scientist "Adam", the first physically implemented laboratory-automation/computer-system demonstrated to be capable of the autonomous discovery of novel scientific knowledge. Adam has generated and confirmed thirteen novel functional-genomics hypotheses concerning the identity of genes encoding enzymes catalysing orphan reactions in the metabolic network of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. We have manually verified Adam's conclusions using biochemical and bioinformatic evidence. These experiments have been formally described using logic. This formalisation involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested tree-like structure eleven levels deep. This structure logically connects 6.6 million OD_600nm measurements to experimental hypotheses, goals, results, etc. No previous large-scale experimental work has been so comprehensively described and recorded. We demonstrate the utility of this formalisation by reusing Adam's functional genomics experiments to investigate questions in Systems Biology.
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