AI Agents

Overview Speaker: Md. Toyaha Rahman Ratul Date: Friday, October 2, 2026, 2:30 PM Room: PM103 The story in short: in 2024, Sakana AI introduced “The AI Scientist,” a system that tries to do the full research cycle by itself. It generates an idea, writes the code, runs the experiments, writes the paper, and even reviews it. In 2025, one paper fully generated by its second version passed peer review at an ICLR workshop, with scores of 6, 7, and 6, which was higher than about 55% of the human-written papers there. The team withdrew the paper before publication, as they had planned with the organizers. In 2026, the work was published in Nature. It has started a big discussion in the community about what AI can and cannot do in research. ...

Overview On March 27, 2025, Tanish Kumar, a PhD student in the Computer Science department at Northern Illinois University, delivered a presentation on Anatomy of an Autonomous AI Agent: From Frameworks to OS, a research area exploring the architectural transition from simple AI tools to integrated agent operating systems. As AI technology evolves, the industry faces a significant gap: while powerful frameworks exist, the challenge remains in how to effectively assemble and manage these components into a reliable system. In his talk, Kumar introduced OpenClaw, a local-first, open-source “Agent OS” designed to move beyond basic orchestration. He discussed the system’s core architecture, including its two-store memory model, lane-aware concurrency control, and the critical separation of the control plane and data plane to ensure security and reliability in production-grade AI agents.