UC San Diego Receives Department of Energy Genesis Mission Award to Fund New Scientific AI Tools

University of California San Diego researchers will lead one of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) new Genesis Mission projects focused on accelerating fundamental physics and quantum computing by deploying intelligent AI agents.

Aobo Li, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) at the Halıcıoğlu School for Data Science and Computing, is the principal investigator (PI) on the project. A team of experts will build SIDERIUS, an AI scientist that can analyze data, design AI models, and deploy them onto specialized chips for applications in fundamental physics and quantum computing. Associate Professor of Physics Yi-Zhuang You is co-PI on the project. EdenCode, an AI company founded by You and alumna Wanda Hou, is a subawardee on the project.

“The next frontier of AI for science is learning how to translate scientific challenges into a form that AI can solve effectively,” said Li. “This DOE award allows us to bring together an interdisciplinary team in a way that wasn’t previously possible. Our vision is to translate challenges in physics and quantum computing into AI-ready tasks that can be tackled by SIDERIUS, our LLM agent system. Our long-term vision is to build a general AI framework that can be adapted to many other data-intensive scientific domains.”