Putting a brain in the mobile robotic chemist
Our Liverpool Virtual Seminar Series on Data Intensive Science will continue on Tuesday 13th May at 15:00 BST. The seminar will be given by Jean-Francois Ayme of the University of Liverpool who will present “Putting a brain in the mobile robotic chemist”
Seminars in this series cover R&D outside of the data intensive science CDT’s core research areas and give an insight into cutting edge research in this area. At the end of the talk there will be a Q&A session with the speaker.
About the talk
In 2020, we showed that mobile robots could be used for closed-loop optimization of photocatalyst formulations, effectively automating the researcher, rather than the instruments. However, in that first study, the robot had no knowledge of the chemistry and it used a 'brute force' Bayesian optimization to discover more effective catalyst mixtures. Here we will describe our more recent work where the aim is to develop hypothesis-led searches; that is, to equip the robot with a knowledge of the chemistry that it is exploring. This study touches on a range of areas such as large language models and human-robot software interfaces that are more broadly relevant to digital chemistry.
About the speaker
Jean-Francois Ayme is a chemist specialising in supramolecular chemistry and automation for chemistry. His academic career includes research with Nobel Laureates J.-P. Sauvage (Strasbourg, MSc) and J.-M. Lehn (Strasbourg/KIT, Postdoc), and Professor D. Leigh (Manchester, PhD). Following time in industry at BASF, he returned to academia, working with Professor L. Cronin in Glasgow on automation of chemistry. Currently based in Professor A. Cooper's group, Jeff's focus is on the digitalisation and automation of chemistry."
How to attend
Participation is free, but you need to register to attend this and other webinars in the series. For more information and how to register please follow this link. Once registered, you will receive the Zoom connection details on the morning of the online seminar.
The seminar details
Speaker: Jean-Francois Ayme (University of Liverpool)
Seminar title: “Putting a brain in the mobile robotic chemist”
Date/Time: Tuesday 13th May at 15:00 GMT