CS & LANS Seminar
Seminar Title: From Workflows to AI Agents: The Evolution of Scientific Automation
Speaker: Ewa Deelman, Ph.D, Research Professor, University of Southern California (USC), Computer Science Department, and Research Director, USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI)
Date: Monday, June 15, 2026
Time: 1:00 PM-2:00 PM (In-Person)
Location: Hybrid, Bldg. 240, TCS Conference Room 1404
Host: Krishnan Raghavan
Description: Scientific workflows have transformed the way researchers automate complex computations, data management, and large-scale analyses. Today, advances in AI are extending automation beyond execution into workflow design, operational decision-making, and resource coordination. This talk traces that evolution through three generations of scientific automation: workflow automation with Pegasus, AI-assisted workflow creation and management with PegasusAI, and distributed agent-based infrastructure coordination in SWARM. Together, these approaches illustrate a shift from automating tasks to enabling increasingly autonomous scientific systems capable of adapting to dynamic resources, data, and experimental needs. The talk concludes by considering how these capabilities may contribute to future autonomous scientific facilities and self-driving laboratories and identifies key cyberinfrastructure challenges and research opportunities along the way.
Bio: Ewa Deelman, Ph.D is a Research Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Computer Science Department and a Research Director at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI). At ISI, she is leading the Science Automation Technologies Center. She is an AAAS, IEEE, and USC/ISI Fellow. The USC/ISI Science Automation Technologies Center explores the interplay between automation and the management of scientific workflows that include resource provisioning and data management, considering reproducibility and open science. Dr. Deelman is also the Principal Investigator and Director of the NSF-funded Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence that serves the NSF Major and Midscale Facilities. Recently, Dr. Deelman received the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award for “pioneering research and software engineering in distributed systems in support of scientific workflows”.
Please note that the meeting URL for this event can be seen on the cels-seminars website which requires an Argonne login.