How AI Is Changing the Questions We Ask
Artificial intelligence has long become part of our everyday lives, from search engines and language models to medical applications. Yet its greatest potential may lie not only in solving existing problems more efficiently, but in fundamentally transforming scientific research. The new Hector Fellow Academy video portrait, "AI in Science: How AI Is Changing the Questions We Ask – Klaus-Robert Müller," explores how artificial intelligence is enabling new scientific discoveries and why it is set to shape the future of research.
Klaus-Robert Müller is Professor of Machine Learning at Technische Universität Berlin, Director of the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), and has been a Hector Fellow since 2023. His research focuses on explainable artificial intelligence and on developing machine learning methods that help researchers uncover hidden patterns in complex datasets and formulate entirely new scientific questions.
In the video portrait, Müller explains why he believes AI's greatest promise lies not in ever more powerful algorithms, but in its role as a catalyst for scientific breakthroughs. Whether in quantum chemistry, materials science, or medicine, artificial intelligence is becoming an indispensable tool for tackling complex research challenges and generating new insights.
A key focus of the film is explainable AI. In sensitive fields such as medicine, it is essential that AI systems produce transparent and interpretable results. The video highlights this through the doctoral research of Laure Ciernik, who is developing machine learning methods to classify brain tumors more accurately based on genetic data, demonstrating how explainable AI can already make a tangible impact in clinical research.
Through its video portrait series, the Hector Fellow Academy regularly offers accessible insights into the work of its Hector Fellows and early-career researchers. The new portrait of Klaus-Robert Müller is now available online.