Stanford team that includes two Chinese among its main developers says system can turn a plain-language request into an entire research workflow
Stanford University-led team including two Chinese researchers said they built the first general-purpose biomedical AIagent capable of working alongside human scientists, taking on complex tasks that once required groups of specialists.
Jure Leskovec, a Stanford computer science professor who supervised the work, said the agent had been released as an open-source system with a web interface so that biologists could use it without writing code.
“We have over 10,000 scientists all over the world using the system for their everyday tasks,” Leskovec said on Tuesday.
In the journal Science this week, the researcher said the system, called Biomni, could turn a plain-language request into an entire research workflow – from searching databases and writing analysis code to finding disease-causing genes and even creating step-by-step lab instructions that scientists successfully followed in real experiments.
In one test, the virtual biologist was given hundreds of raw files collected from wearable devices and asked to look for biological patterns. It cleaned the data, ran the analysis and generated new hypotheses.