By the Office of the Dean for Research
Eight innovative research projects, including one led by Tom Griffiths, recently received funding through Princeton’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt Transformative Technology Fund — the largest number of annual awards in the fund’s history. The projects have potential to enable new capabilities and fundamental understandings across broad areas of science and engineering and involve faculty, researchers and graduate students from more than 10 Princeton departments and institutes.
The goal of the fund is to enable researchers to make bold leaps rather than incremental advances in the natural sciences and engineering. It supports projects that lead to the invention of a disruptive new technology that can have a major impact on a field of research; the development of equipment or an enabling technology that will transform research in a field; or the innovative application of new technologies to solve complex research problems, open new avenues of inquiry, or significantly enhance the capabilities of existing research methodologies.
The fund was created in 2009 through a gift from Eric and Wendy Schmidt. Eric Schmidt is executive chairman and CEO of Relativity Space, co-founder of Schmidt Sciences, The Schmidt Family Foundation, and Schmidt Ocean Institute, the former chief executive officer of Google, and former executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company. Wendy Schmidt is co-founder of Schmidt Sciences, and president and co-founder of The Schmidt Family Foundation and Schmidt Ocean Institute. Eric Schmidt earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton in 1976 and served as a Princeton trustee from 2004 to 2008.
“The research teams supported through the Schmidt fund this year are poised to create powerful new research tools and to use AI and machine learning to accelerate discovery,” said Princeton University Dean for Research Peter Schiffer. “The fund enables researchers across disciplines to take big swings, advance ambitious and exciting research, and even build new fields that benefit society.”
The eight projects were selected for funding with the input of an anonymous panel of faculty reviewers. Griffiths, professor of computer science and psychology, is co-leading a project with Jonathan Cohen, professor of neuroscience.
Automating scientific discovery in the behavioral sciences
Jonathan Cohen, Robert Bendheim and Lynn Bendheim Thoman Professor in Neuroscience; professor of psychology and neuroscience; and associate director, Natural and Artificial Minds Initiative
Thomas Griffiths, Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture of Psychology and Computer Science and director, Princeton Lab for Artificial Intelligence
This project aims to harness the power of artificial intelligence and the advantages of an online platform to further the study of human cognitive function. The research team will build on their previous advances, including an experimental design framework and computational tools for model design and behavioral data collection, to create an automated computational system that uses AI to articulate hypotheses, design experiments, deploy the experiments to collect data on the internet, and use the results to refine the hypotheses. The project involves two phases: first, the development of a closed-loop discovery system and second, the application of this system to the study of cognitive control. Ultimately, the goal is for this project to result in an automated, open-source system for behavioral discovery that can drive further advances in both cognitive science and AI systems.