Jesse Thaler

Jesse Thaler is an American particle physicist who is a professor at the MIT Department of Physics. He was named director of the NSF Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI) upon its creation in August 2020. Quotes AI and physics is really a two-way street: AI’s influence on how we research new physics phenomena, but also applying physics thinking to the way that AI systems operate. I basically told them, in no uncertain terms, that this was not the way that I thought physics research should be going. And they agreed with me, actually, about the off-the-shelf use of machine learning. Where would someone live within the academic ecosystem if they wanted to dive into physics topics, but also computation and statistics? That was the motivation for submitting a grant to the NSF to start this institute.If you think about AI solely as it applies to fundamental physics research, we have massive challenges in our field and we’re trying to understand some of the deepest questions in nature. Cosmology is another area with massive amounts of data and massive computational costs to run simulations of the universe. Without something like machine learning, we simply wouldn't be able to tackle those problems. there is physics for AI, where there are concepts from physics that can help you build better AI tools, even if you aren’t directly studying physical systems. You can build machine learning architectures that have physics-style reasoning embedded and those concepts turn out to be quite powerful. Jesse Thaler on AI and physics External links Category:Physicists from the United States Category:Academics from the United States Category:Living people Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty Category:Brown University alumni Category:Harvard University alumni