AI for Science

Speaker: Prof. Wei-Ying Ma
馬維英 教授
電機資訊學院傑出校友
前微軟研究院副院長
Institute for AI Industry Research
Tsinghua University
Beijing, China

Abstract: In recent years, rapid advancements in AI—particularly in generative AI and large language models (LLMs)—have led to significant progress in fields such as natural language processing and computer vision. This success has motivated researchers to leverage AI for scientific discovery and innovation across disciplines like biology, chemistry, energy, and materials science. For instance, generative AI is transforming biology through advancements in molecule generation, drug discovery, and protein design. Additionally, AI’s application in designing new chemical compounds and materials has the potential to transform traditional methods, creating a paradigm shift. In this talk, I will present some of our recent works and discuss how AI is poised to shape the future of scientific research and related industries. 

Bio: Wei-Ying Ma is a Huiyan Chair Professor at Tsinghua University and the Chief Scientist at the Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR). He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE. Previously, he was a Vice President and Head of the AI Lab at ByteDance, where he led the development of AI-powered content creation and dissemination technologies integrated into products such as Douyin, TikTok, Jinri Toutiao, CapCut, and Lark. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Managing Director at Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), where he led research groups to develop web search and data mining technologies that were successfully integrated into Microsoft's Bing. From 2021-2023, he served as the Director of Health Computing Research Center with Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). He has co-founded Helixon, a startup aimed at developing next-generation AI for antibody design and protein therapeutics discovery. He served as a program co-chair of the International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW) in 2008 and the general co-chair of the ACM SIGIR 2011. He has published more than 300 papers and has been granted with 169 patents. He received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan in 1990 and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1997.