{"slug": "author-visits-network-school-in-forest-city", "title": "Author Visits Network School in Forest City", "summary": "Physicist and blogger Tommaso Dorigo delivered the second plenary talk at the AI4X - Accelerate Conference 2026 in Singapore, arguing that fundamental science needs a phase transition where AI guides experimental design rather than just analyzing data. After the conference, Dorigo visited the Network School in Forest City, Malaysia, a technology community project in a formerly vacant development.", "body_md": "# Author Visits Network School in Forest City\n\nPhysicist and blogger Tommaso Dorigo, per his Science 2.0 post, attended the AI4X - Accelerate Conference 2026 in Singapore (June 15-19) and delivered the second plenary talk on the opening day. Per his post, Dorigo argued that fundamental science needs a phase transition - moving beyond using ML as a data-analysis layer toward letting AI actively guide experimental design, treating hardware and software as a co-design problem. The AI4X conference is co-organized by NUS's Institute for Functional Intelligent Materials and the Acceleration Consortium at the University of Toronto. After the conference, Dorigo crossed into Johor, Malaysia, to visit the Network School in Forest City - a technology-community project in the formerly near-vacant Forest City development.\n\n### What happened\n\nPhysicist and blogger Tommaso Dorigo, per his Science 2.0 post, attended the **AI4X - Accelerate Conference 2026** in Singapore (June 15-19) and delivered the second plenary talk on the opening day. Per his post, Dorigo argued that fundamental science should enter another phase transition - moving beyond adopting ML as a data-analysis layer toward letting AI guide experimental design itself, treating hardware and software as a co-design problem.\n\n### Conference context\n\nThe AI4X - Accelerate Conference 2026 is co-organized by NUS's Institute for Functional Intelligent Materials (I-FIM) and the Acceleration Consortium at the University of Toronto. Per the official conference site, the event brought together 60-plus world-leading speakers and 800-plus participants over five days, focusing on AI applications in scientific research and deep-tech. The Acceleration Consortium is an established academic initiative on self-driving laboratories and AI-driven materials discovery.\n\n### The Network School visit\n\nAfter the Singapore conference, Dorigo crossed the border into Johor, Malaysia, to visit the **Network School** in **Forest City** - a technology community project in the formerly near-vacant Forest City development that has drawn government interest in Malaysia, per Malay Mail reporting from May 2026. Dorigo's post records first-person observations of the border crossing, cityscape, and community.\n\n### Editorial note\n\nThis is a personal travel narrative and conference blog post rather than a research paper or product release. Dorigo's framing of AI-guided experiment design as a necessary 'phase transition' reflects an ongoing debate in the AI-for-science community, and no new technical or policy development is announced here. Coverage is thin (single personal blog source).\n\n## Scoring Rationale\n\nA personal travel blog post by physicist Tommaso Dorigo recounting his AI4X plenary talk on AI-guided experimental design and a visit to the Network School in Forest City, Malaysia. The AI4X conference theme - accelerating scientific discovery via AI - is on-topic for AI/DS practitioners, but coverage is a first-person narrative with no new research, product, or policy announcement. Scored at the floor for on-topic personal conference reporting.\n\nPractice interview problems based on real data\n\n1,500+ SQL & Python problems across 15 industry datasets — the exact type of data you work with.\n\n[Try 250 free problems](/problems)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/author-visits-network-school-in-forest-city", "canonical_source": "https://letsdatascience.com/news/author-visits-network-school-in-forest-city-7312eab6", "published_at": "2026-06-20 16:08:43.989096+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-20 16:08:46.054242+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "machine-learning", "ai-research", "ai-agents", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Tommaso Dorigo", "AI4X - Accelerate Conference 2026", "National University of Singapore", "Institute for Functional Intelligent Materials", "University of Toronto", "Acceleration Consortium", "Network School", "Forest City"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/author-visits-network-school-in-forest-city", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/author-visits-network-school-in-forest-city.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/author-visits-network-school-in-forest-city.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/author-visits-network-school-in-forest-city.jsonld"}}