Overview
Automation Science is the process of conducting scientific research with minimum human involvement. In other words, the objective of automation science is to develop self-driving instruments which can decide the best feasible solutions based on available data.
Genomic sequencing and drug screening are two key uses of automation science in biomedical research. Thanks to the availability of highly automated equipment, experiments can now be automated. However, researchers still rely on human scientists to set the parameters of experiments. Because of advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is now feasible to create an intelligent system that can design complex experiments with a better likelihood of success.
The need for a new type of automated science stems from the realization that for many disciplines, like biology, there is no set of rules or laws that can be learned and from which everything else can be predicted. This fundamentally changes the paradigm of scientific research from a hypothesis-driven search for such laws to a data-driven construction of empirical models. As many systems have too many variables and are too complex for humans to be able to think about, researchers need automated ways of constructing empirical models.
Ideas & Innovations
