Scientists created a new AI algorithm for making measurement decisions; autonomous approach could revolutionize scientific experiments.
A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory designed, created, and successfully tested a new algorithm to make smarter scientific measurement decisions. The algorithm, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), can make autonomous decisions to define and perform the next step of an experiment. The team described the capabilities and flexibility of their new measurement tool in a paper published on August 14, 2019 in Nature Scientific Reports.
From Galileo and Newton to the recent discovery of gravitational waves, performing scientific experiments to understand the world around us has been the driving force of our technological advancement for hundreds of years. Improving the way researchers do their experiments can have tremendous impact on how quickly those experiments yield applicable results for new technologies.
>Read more on the NSLS-II at Brookhaven Lab website.
Image: (From left to right) Kevin Yager, Masafumi Fukuto, and Ruipeng Li prepared the Complex Materials Scattering (CMS) beamline at NSLS-II for a measurement using the new decision-making algorithm, which was developed by Marcus Noack (not pictured).