Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences

The "Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences" workshop aims to provide a cutting-edge venue for research at the interface of machine learning (ML) and the physical sciences. This interface spans (1) applications of ML in physical sciences (“ML for physics”) and (2) developments in ML motivated by physical insights (“physics for ML”).

ML methods have had great success in learning complex representations of data that enable novel modeling and data processing approaches in many scientific disciplines. Physical sciences span problems and challenges at all scales in the universe: from finding exoplanets in trillions of sky pixels, to finding ML inspired solutions to the quantum many-body problem, to detecting anomalies in event streams from the Large Hadron Collider, to predicting how extreme weather events will vary with climate change. Tackling a number of associated data-intensive tasks including, but not limited to, segmentation, 3D computer vision, sequence modeling, causal reasoning, generative modeling, and efficient probabilistic inference are critical for furthering scientific discovery. In addition to using ML models for scientific discovery, tools and insights from the physical sciences are increasingly brought to the study of ML models.

By bringing together ML researchers and physical scientists who apply and study ML, we expect to strengthen the interdisciplinary dialogue, introduce exciting new open problems to the broader community, and stimulate the production of new approaches to solving challenging open problems in the sciences. Invited talks from leading individuals in both communities will cover the state-of-the-art techniques and set the stage for this workshop, which will also include contributed talks selected from submissions. The workshop will also feature an expert panel discussion on “Physics for ML" and a breakout session dedicated to community building will serve to foster dialogue between physical science and ML research communities.