The Center for Translational Data Science is proud to announce that we will be hosting Dr. Forest Agostinelli on July 9th at 11am CST for a seminar on his work building AI agents that learn to solve puzzles and how this relates to the natural sciences. Dr. Agostinelli is an Assistant Professor at the AI Institute in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina. He received his B.S. from the Ohio State University, his M.S. from the University of Michigan, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine under Professor Pierre Baldi. His group conducts research in the fields of deep learning, reinforcement learning, search, explainability, bioinformatics, neuroscience, and chemistry. In this talk, Dr. Agostinelli will present DeepCubeA, a deep reinforcement learning and search algorithm that can solve the Rubik’s cube, and six other puzzles, without domain specific knowledge. Next, he will discuss how solving combination puzzles opens up new possibilities for solving problems in the natural sciences. Finally, he will show how problems we encounter in the natural sciences motivate future research directions in areas such as explainable artificial intelligence and education. A demonstration of their work can be seen at http://deepcube.igb.uci.edu/.