UniverseTBD: Democratising Science with AI & Why Stories Matter

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:25040062,
            doi = {10.48660/25040062},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/25040062},
            author = {Ciuca, Ioana},
            keywords = {},
            language = {en},
            title = {UniverseTBD: Democratising Science with AI \& Why Stories Matter},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2025},
            month = {apr},
            note = {PIRSA:25040062 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }
          

Abstract

UniverseTBD is an interdisciplinary community of astronomers, AI researchers, engineers, artists and enthusiasts aligned on a bold mission to democratise Science for everyone. From releasing the first large language model in Astronomy, AstroLLaMA-1, to the AI-enabled literature discovery tool Pathfinder, and through our research with AstroPT and HypoGen, our team has pushed the boundaries of AI for Science for the past two years. In this talk, I discuss for the first time how UniverseTBD came to be, our vision, our values, and what drives us and has enabled us to scale our team projects in our commitment to share our learnings with the broader scientific community. I also briefly discuss our latest results with hypothesis generation (HypoGen), multimodal language models (AstroLlaVA-1) and agentic AI (AstroCoder). I conclude with a vision for the future where AI teams up with human researchers to "help us understand the Universe".