Fields of Research
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a field of research in its own right, but it can also accelerate scientific discovery in many fields, provided that it fosters closer ties between different scientific communities. Because of its national and multidisciplinary scope, as well as its international standing, the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) must play a driving role in promoting these interactions between different fields of research. As they are not only related to the assimilation of AI methods (in particular, machine learning), they are also necessary for the removal of barriers specific to this field related to strategic subjects such as explainability, the incorporation of expert knowledge, and frugality.
AI is certainly transforming our societies, but AI, as a knowledge discovery paradigm, is also impacting the way research is produced across disciplines. AI methods, in particular Machine Learning, represent today an important challenge for modeling increasingly complex and multiscale systems, as well as exploiting the massive increase in flows, volumes and the diversity of multi-source data from large instruments, observation systems, experimental platforms, etc. They are leading to new research practices whose level of maturity and organization varies greatly from one discipline to another, as well as new needs in terms of expertise and international collaborations. Within the CNRS, AI methods are now being deployed very rapidly in the context of major research infrastructures and national and international experimental platforms that the CNRS supports or to which it contributes (for instance, in biology, high-energy physics, climate modeling, etc.). The very aim of the AISSAI Center is to foster dialogue between disciplines, to address new scientific questions and to establish radically new modes of collaboration between scientific fields.