CCA Senior Research Scientist Shirley Ho Named an AI2050 Senior Fellow by Schmidt Sciences
Schmidt Sciences has named Flatiron Institute Senior Research Scientist Shirley Ho as one of its seven AI2050 Senior Fellows. The prestigious fellowships support scholars pursuing projects that could “help AI create immense benefits for humanity by 2050.” Ho and the other fellows will receive funding for three years.
The announcement celebrated Ho’s work to “combine the capabilities of specialized scientific AI models like AlphaFold with more general AI models that can reason about science without understanding it deeply, building a stepping stone toward scientific artificial general intelligence.”
“AI is underhyped, especially when it comes to its potential to benefit humanity,” said Eric Schmidt, co-founder of Schmidt Sciences, in the announcement. “The AI2050 fellowship was established to turn that potential into reality by supporting the people and ideas shaping a healthier, more resilient and more secure world.”
Ho joined the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in 2018 and is a research professor of physics at New York University. Her research interests range from cosmology to developing new machine learning methods for scientific data that leverage shared concepts across scientific domains. She is the project leader of Polymathic AI, an ambitious new endeavor that will leverage the same technology behind ChatGPT to build AI-powered tools for scientific discovery.
Ho earned her Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University in 2008 and undergraduate degrees in computer science and physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. Her awards include the Macronix Prize, the Carnegie Science Award and the EPS Giuseppe and Vanna Cocconi Prize in Cosmology. She was also a finalist for the 2023 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists.
