Working Groups Comprehensive List

General
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Conference Working Groups

Below are the working groups, their goals, bottom-liners, and everyone who’s expressed interest. Reply under this post to join a group or start a follow-up thread.

1. Graduate Education in the Age of AI

Concrete steps in the next 6–60 months

  • Goal: Framing out and workshop
  • Bottom-liners: James Ricci, Josh Greenberg
  • Interested: Chris S, Iyad, Magdalena, Selma, Casey, Shantenu

2. AI-Accelerated Instrumentation

  • Goal: Exploit current AI to assess its ability to devise, design, and “build” devices that meet concrete performance specs (AI-optimized instrumentation)
    • Scope
    • Benchmarks
    • Make N devices
  • Bottom-liner: Timothy
  • Interested: Eli, Chris S, Henry, Jordan, Selma, Iyad, David, Suhas

3. Federated Active Learning for Protein Function

  • Goal: Minimize cost for high-quality data generation
  • Bottom-liners: Joshua, Yuchen
  • Interested: David, Rohith, Manjari

4. Human Data Samples for AI

  • Goal: Mine existing medical/biomed samples, data, and signals — getting the data out and making it actionable for the AI community
  • Bottom-liners: Casey, Iyad
  • Interested: Allyson, Rohith

5. Neuro Segmentation Challenge

  • Goal: Peta-scale 3D image segmentation competition for brain wiring diagrams
  • Bottom-liners: Jordan, Yuechen
  • Interested: Allyson, Ant

6. Interviewing

  • Goal: How do you evaluate a candidate’s technical skills in an agentic coding world?
  • Bottom-liner: Yael
  • Interested: Casey

7. Research Taste / Idea Tinder

  • Goal: Aggregate researcher/scientist preferences over ideas and problems — a HackerNews equivalent (DPOP)
  • Bottom-liners: Garyk & Claude, David & Rohith
  • Interested: Allison, Henry

8. “Smart” Schema System

  • Goal: Create a relational mapping of datasets so nomenclature, metadata, etc. can be aligned to make science data maximally useful
    • Bridge + centrality + index
  • Bottom-liners: Sasha, Calvin
  • Interested: Maria

9. Interpretable, Causal World Models for Science and Embodied Systems

  • Goal: White paper / IPO (?)
  • Bottom-liners: Christina, Sonia — Rico post July 31
  • Interested: Jordan, Manjari, Delia, Eli, Calvin

10. Quality Data Fellowship Prize

Recognize good data

  • Goal: Develop a definition of good science data and change incentives
  • Bottom-liners: Josh (Sloan), Calvin, Magdalena
  • Interested: Betsy, Maria

11. Enabling Effective Acceleration Across the Lab Workflow — A Hitchhiker’s Guide

  • Goal: Whitepaper with actionable best practices
  • Bottom-liners: Magdalena, Maria, Sasha, Jordan, Allyson
  • Interested: Selma, Delia, Timothy, Casey, Henry, Chris S, Ant, Shantenu, Suhas

12. Natural History Museums Contain the Language of Life

  • Goal: Sequence genomes and cell expression across millions of species
  • Bottom-liner: Jake
  • Interested: Henry, Garyk, David, Chris S, Jonas

13. Oh Wow

  • Goal: Never innovate alone
  • Bottom-liners: Betsy, Casey, Henry, Karthik
  • Interested: Alex, Jordan