More than 400 years ago, Galileo Galilei pointed his uniquely magnified telescope at the moon, revealing hitherto unknown lunar phenomena. And while he didn't invent the telescope, his modifications and utilization of the tool changed the course of human history. Last week, UHD alum Randy Davila, Ph.D., a lecturer at Rice University and software engineer at RelationalAI, presented his own unique deployment of existing technology at Harvard University's Math and Machine Learning Reunion Workshop as one of the invited speakers.
The event invited alumni and friends of Harvard’s Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications to share their work and research, discuss industry developments in artificial intelligence, and collaboratively develop new directions for their groundbreaking work in an explosive industry. Dr. Davila, in the company of leading minds from the University of Oxford and Google DeepMind, presented “Recent Developments in Automated Conjecturing,” and offered what he said was “a glimpse into a future where AI contributes meaningfully to the creative process of mathematics.”
Part of that future will almost certainly be the AI Davila himself created, TxGraffiti, an AI program that produces research conjectures about complex mathematical relationships by analyzing large datasets and graphs and identifying relationships between such datasets, which it then uses to output conjectures (the mathematical term for an educated guess) on the nature of the relationships. The program, said Davila, “can uncover a new inequality in graph theory or propose a structural relationship in string theory.”
Davila also touched on the history of this field, from early programs to modern neural breakthroughs, before unveiling his own groundbreaking system and explaining how it produces precise, human-readable, and logically rigorous conjectures.
The workshop and his work, both within the academy and in industry, serve as an example of what’s possible for UHD graduates, and evidence the fact that all Gators leave the bayou equipped with skills to meaningfully contribute in ways that change our world.