Akari Asai

Akari Asai is an incoming Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with a primary appointment in the Language Technologies Institute and a courtesy appointment in the Machine Learning Department, and a Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) OLMo, where she leads the deep research agent team. She received her Ph.D. from the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her research advances reliable and adaptable language systems, especially retrieval-augmented and agentic language models, and applies them to high-impact settings, including scientific discovery and information access for underrepresented languages. Her work has been published at top-tier NLP and ML venues and in Nature, and has been recognized with multiple paper awards, the IBM Global Fellowship, and industry grants. She is a recipient of the 2025 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Doctoral Dissertation Award and was named to MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 and Forbes Asia 30 Under 30.

AI2050 Project

Asai’s project aims to build AI agents that can better support scientific discovery. Today’s agents can summarize papers or help with coding, but they are much less reliable when scientists need to decide what experiment to run next, adapt to real laboratory settings, or judge whether a research outcome is significant. She will develop AI agents that can read scientific literature, use local data and tools, interact with laboratory environments, and evaluate scientific claims based on evidence rather than surface-level fluency. The long-term goal is to create trustworthy AI partners that help scientists work faster, more carefully, and more effectively.