AI4Science Workshop

Date: 05 February 2026

YouTube link

A first-of-its-kind workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Science was conducted at the Faculty Hall, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) on 05 February 2026. It was attended by over 80 students, research staff, and faculty members from IISc. The speakers included IISc faculty members and a professional from Google DeepMind.

The AI4Science workshop was organised with the following objectives.

  1. To identify common interests in AI and science among IISc faculty, to foster partnership in addressing grand challenge problems.
  2. To create an IISc-wide programme for research in AI and science.
  3. To create national initiative/s in this area.
  4. To explore industry collaboration with IISc in the field of AI and science.
  5. To form an IISc-wide working group on curriculum/courses, which would focus on repurposing existing courses/programmes at IISc and launching new courses/programmes at the intersection of AI and science.

The morning session featured talks by IISc faculty who presented research work in which AI had played a role/research work in which AI could potentially play a role, thereby greatly increasing the speed, quality, and quantity of research output. The industry talk introduced the use of mixed-mode continuous diffusion models in scientific research. The afternoon session had two panel discussions on Research and Education. The panel discussion on Research covered the characteristics of the field of AI4Science, the problems that it can solve, and IISc’s strategy in this field. The panel discussion on Education focused on two questions, namely (i) How do we change courses and training programmes to match with the necessity to take the interface between AI and sciences forward? (ii) Within the framework of education, how do we balance between rigour and critical thinking on one hand vs the efficient and innovative use of AI tools on the other?