AI in Action: AI's early proving ground: the hunt for new particles.

20 7 JULY 2017 • VOL 357 ISSUE 6346 sciencemag.org SCIENCE with the same goal: harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to augment—or even replace—the role of humans in the scientific process (see graphic, p. 21). “AI-powered biotech” is how it has been described, but Zymergen’s co-founders cringe at the term. “‘AI’ sounds like a robot playing chess,” says Aaron Kimball, the company’s chief technical officer. “I’m comfortable with ‘ML,’” Hoffman says, referring to machine learning, the branch of computer science that accounts for nearly all recent progress in AI. “That gets at what we do.”