24–28 Aug 2026
Kirchhoff Institute for Physics (KIP)
Europe/Berlin timezone

The Model Says Yes. Now What? And Other Adventures in Scientific AI

25 Aug 2026, 09:45
45m
HS1

HS1

Speaker

Lucie Flek (University of Bonn)

Description

What can we actually conclude when a model gives us the right answer? Did it learn the right correlations? Does it generalize beyond the setting in which we tested it? And what does it mean to validate increasingly complex "scientific AI" models and workflows? I will explore these questions through examples and cautionary tales from language modeling, human modeling, particle physics and astrophysics — from unexpected correlations and hidden systematics to surprising generalization, foundation models and scientific agents producing convincing, but not always plausible, results.

Presentation materials