Professor Victor Zhong, principal investigator, and co-investigator Professor Jimmy Lin have been awarded $1,641,776 through the NSERC Alliance Grant program. This funding is complemented by more than $1.8 million in combined cash and in-kind contributions from industry partner BASF Canada, bringing the total project value to roughly $3.5 million.
Titled “Deep Research Agents for Natural Science R&D,” the three-year project will co-develop and deploy an end-to-end intelligent research assistant capable of retrieving, reasoning over, and acting on diverse experimental data sources. Developed in partnership with BASF Canada, the project aims to transform chemical informatics from static information retrieval into dynamic, action-oriented knowledge systems that accelerate scientific discovery.
The project will also play a significant role in training the next generation of researchers. Over its three years, it will support two postdoctoral researchers, six PhD students, and two master’s students.
Left to right: Professors Victor Zhong, Jimmy Lin
Victor Zhong is an Assistant Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing, with an emphasis on using language understanding to learn more generally and efficiently. He leads the R2L Lab, which builds intelligent generalist agents that read, reason and act across digital and physical environments.
Jimmy Lin is a Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, where he holds the David R. Cheriton Chair in Software Systems. His research focuses on building tools that help users make sense of large amounts of data. He works at the intersection of information retrieval, natural language processing, and data management. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and a member of the SIGIR Academy.
Read the full article on the Cheriton School of Computer Science's website.