UTCS professor Swarat Chaudhuri was named as a fellow in John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation 100th fellowship class.
Swarat Chaudhuri will design AI systems that can discover new mathematical concepts.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has named Swarat Chaudhuri, a professor of computer science at The University of Texas at Austin, among its 100th class of Guggenheim Fellows. The fellowship offers support to exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form.
Chaudhuri was selected as one of 198 individuals to receive the fellowship out of almost 3,500 applicants. Two other UT Austin faculty members, a physicist and a photographer, were also selected this year.
Chaudhuri’s lab has developed an AI agent called Copra that repeatedly asks a large language model (LLM) to predict the next step in a proof of a mathematical theorem. Once the LLM chooses a step, the system uses it to simplify the problem, and the LLM makes another prediction. However, this method works only for theorems with set proof goals.
Through the fellowship, Chaudhuri will work on designing an AI agent that proposes new math problems and their solutions, and another one that evaluates the “interestingness” the outputs of the first agent. Unlike his previous research, this project will emulate the curiosity-driven exploration that human mathematicians are known for. As such, it will be an important step, Chaudhuri explains, towards “building AI systems that can co-author research papers with human mathematicians,” which would represent a major advance in the use of AI for mathematics.
“In bringing to bear keen insights about the potential within generative AI to advance trustworthy mathematical discoveries, Swarat Chaudhuri is a worthy recipient of this elite fellowship,” said Don Fussell, chair of the Department of Computer Science. “The award is a positive reflection on the importance of Dr. Chaudhuri’s ongoing project to apply machine learning in helping mathematics research.”
Chaudhuri received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007, and he joined UT Austin in 2020 after serving as a faculty member at Pennsylvania State University and Rice University. Among other awards, he received a Best Dissertation Award from Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Programming Languages and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
Since its establishment in 1925, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has granted more than $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 individuals, among whom are more than 125 Nobel laureates, members of all the national academies, winners of the Pulitzer Prize, Fields Medal, Turing Award, Bancroft Prize, National Book Award and other internationally recognized honors.
“At a time when intellectual life is under attack, the Guggenheim Fellowship celebrates a century
of support for the lives and work of visionary scientists, scholars, writers, and artists,” said
Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and President of the Guggenheim Foundation, in today’s announcement. “We believe that these creative thinkers can take on the challenges we all face today and guide our society towards a better and more hopeful future.”