Event Date
Professor James Zou
Department of Biomedical Data Science, Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
Stanford University
Abstract:
AI agents—large language models equipped with tools and reasoning capabilities—are emerging as powerful research enablers. This talk will explore how agentic AI can accelerate scientific discoveries. I’ll first introduce the Virtual Lab—a collaborative team of AI scientist agents conducting in silico research meetings to tackle open-ended research projects. As an example application, the Virtual Lab designed new nanobody binders to recent Covid variants that we experimentally validated. Then, I will present CellVoyager, a data science agent that analyzes complex genomics data to derive new insights. Finally, I will introduce Paper2Agent, a framework to automatically convert passive research papers into interactive AI agents.
Bio:
James Zou is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Data Science, CS and EE at Stanford University. He works on developing cutting-edge AI for biomedical applications. His group developed many widely used innovations including EchoNet AI (FDA cleared for assessing cardiac function), Gradio (used by over a million developers), and SyntheMol (NY Times 2024 Good Tech). He has received the Overton Prize, Sloan Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, two Chan-Zuckerberg Investigator Awards, a Top Ten Clinical Achievement Award, best paper awards at ICML and other AI conferences, and faculty awards from Google, Amazon, Adobe and Apple.