NLP on Chemistry
February 1, 2024 1:00 - 2:00 PM CST
Presenter: Carl Edwards, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Session Overview
Climate change, access to food and water, pandemics--- these words, when uttered, immediately summon to mind global challenges with possible disastrous outcomes. The world faces an enormous number of problems in the coming decades on scales of complexity never before seen. To address these issues, we need to discover inventive scientific solutions that are scalable, flexible, and inexpensive. Broadly speaking, many of these problems will require molecular solutions from the chemistry domain, such as developing new drugs (e.g., kinase inhibitors), materials (e.g., organic photovoltaics), and chemical processes. These solutions exist in extremely large search spaces, which makes AI tools a necessity. Of particular note, multimodal models combining language with molecules are poised to be a critical tool for discovering these solutions. In this tutorial, we will discuss the role that natural language processing can play in discovering and accelerating solutions to global problems via the broad chemistry domain.