AI in Action: Simon Billinge & Nina Miolane
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Join us for the third event in UCSB Library’s new speaker series, AI in Action Conversations with UCSB Researchers. The event features short presentations by Simon Billinge (California NanoSystems Institute) and Nina Miolane (REAL AI for Science) on innovative applications of AI in their research, followed by a 30-minute moderated discussion on broader trends, challenges, and ethical considerations.
In his presentation titled “LLM chatbots: omniscient super-intelligence or just BS?,” Billinge will discuss how AI powered virtual assistants have gone from being the butt of jokes due to their dysfunction, to engendering fear that they will achieve super-intelligence and take over and destroy the human race, in a remarkably short time. Billinge will also briefly describe some ways in which AI is being used in scientific research at the California NanoSystems Institute and in materials science in general.
In her presentation titled “AI-Powered Science and the Digital Twin Revolution,” Miolane will discuss how through REAL AI, she uses her model to develop brain digital twins to forecast brain health and personalize care, with a special focus on modeling changes in women’s brains across pregnancy, menopause, and aging.
This event may be photographed or recorded.
Advance registration is recommended as space is limited.
About the Speakers
Dr. Simon Billinge is Professor of Materials Science and Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UC Santa Barbara. He has more than 25 years of experience developing and applying techniques to study local structure in materials using x-ray, neutron and electron diffraction including the development of novel data analysis methods including graph theoretic, artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches. Prior to joining UCSB in 2026, he was a faculty member at Michigan State University and Columbia University. He also held a joint position of Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory between 2008 and 2022. Billinge has published more than 350 papers in scholarly journals. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the Neutron Scattering Society of America, a former Fulbright and Sloan fellow and has earned a number of awards including, in 2025, the Gregori Aminoff prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and the Innovation in Materials Characterization Award of the Materials Research Society.
Dr. Nina Miolane is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, where she co-directs REAL AI for Science and the AI Core of the Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative. She also leads the Geometric Intelligence Lab, where her team studies how brains and machines make sense of the world and make decisions.They use ideas from mathematics, neuroscience, and AI to understand patterns in neuronal activity across biological and artificial brains and build smarter, more efficient AI systems.
About AI in Action
AI in Action: Conversations with UCSB Researchers aims to foster an open, interdisciplinary community exploring how AI can deepen understanding, expand access to knowledge, and inspire new forms of scholarship. The speaker series showcases how UC Santa Barbara researchers are using innovative applications of AI, from accelerating materials science and environmental modeling to uncovering new insights in language, art, and history. Each session includes presentations by UCSB faculty and research teams on how AI tools and methods are shaping their work, followed by discussion on broader trends, challenges, and ethical considerations.
AI in Action is co-led by UCSB Library and the UCSB AI Community of Practice (CoP), AI for Research Special Interest Group, with support from the Office of the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost, Office of Research, Office of Teaching and Learning, Marine Science Institute, and National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.
