5 AI breakthroughs that could change the face of science

Following years of research, AI is starting to have an impact on the way science is done, as these five Imperial studies from 2017 show. Barely a week has gone by in 2017 without warnings in the media about how Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics is threatening to make all human workers redundant. The reality is likely to be more subtle and in fact involve closer collaboration between computers and humans. But even in complex areas like scientific research, AI is having an impact on the way we approach certain problems and questions. AI techniques, such as machine learning, represent a complete step-change in ability. By combing heavy lifting computational power with more subtle human-like reasoning we can start to address scientific problems that were previously thought to be intractable - to computers or human scientists separately.