Friday, November 13, 2026
Carl Kesselman, Ph.D., and Dr. Robert Schuler, Ph.D. will present "Building AI-Ready Scientific Data Ecosystems: From FAIR Principles to Intelligent Agent Integration" from 12:00 p.m.–1:00 p.m. EDT.
About the Seminars
AI-ready science is constrained less by model sophistication than by the shortage of high-quality, well-described data and by infrastructure that cannot keep pace with evolving methods. Drawing on experiences with FaceBase and the Deriva platform across craniofacial, hearing, and ophthalmology research, we argue that FAIR data largely subsumes "AI-ready" data, and that sustainable repositories follow SCALE principles: Self-service curation, domain-Agnostic platforms, Lightweight models, and Evolvable systems.
As large language model agents become the layer through which researchers interact with data, a further question arises: what makes a repository agent-ready? We propose three architectural requirements—documented service interfaces with full coverage, FAIR metadata annotated with community ontologies, and an introspectable data model with an LLM-aligned query interface—and show how an agent built on them can mediate the full research lifecycle, from discovery through citable dataset assembly to curation of results back into the repository, capturing experimental context that artifact-level reproducibility alone cannot.
About the Speakers
Carl Kesselman is the William M. Keck Professor of Engineering at the University of Southern California, with appointments in the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, the Keck School of Medicine, and the Herman Ostrow School of Dentistry. He is Director of the Informatics Systems Research Division at the USC Information Sciences Institute and is internationally recognized as one of the pioneers of Grid Computing and distributed cyberinfrastructure. His research has spanned distributed systems, scientific cyberinfrastructure, data integration, security, and large-scale collaborative science platforms. More recently, his work has focused on data-centric socio-technical ecosystems, AI-enabled scientific infrastructure, and agent-mediated systems that support long-running human-machine scientific interactions. Kesselman is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and the British Computer Society. His honors include the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal, the IEEE Internet Award, and the IEEE Computer Society's Goode Memorial Award, and the ACM High Performance Computing Achievement Award by HPDC. He was also named one of the 35 Legends of High Performance Computing by HPC Wire Magazine in 2025.
Dr. Robert Schuler is a Lead Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI). He is the technical lead for the FaceBase Consortium, the NIH-funded data hub for craniofacial, dental, inner ear, and broader biomedical research, supported by NIDCR, NIDCD, and ODSS. His research interests span sociotechnical approaches to empowering scientists with data-centric research methods, building communities of practice around shared data resources, reproducible machine learning, and AI agents as collaborators in the scientific process. Before FaceBase, he served on the leadership team of the Biomedical Informatics Research Network (NIH/NCRR) and led the development and deployment of large-scale research data grids, including multi-site collaborative functional neuroimaging and veterinary pathology for the national primate research centers. Earlier, he held senior research engineering roles in the Globus Project, helping to build the shared, globally distributed computing infrastructure that supported high-energy physics, gravitational-wave astronomy, and climate science.
About the Seminar Series
The seminar is open to the public and registration is required each month. Individuals who need interpreting services and/or other reasonable accommodations to participate in this event should contact Allison Hurst at 301-670-4990. Requests should be made at least five days in advance of the event.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Data Science Strategy hosts this seminar series to highlight examples of data sharing and reuse on the second Friday of each month at noon ET. The monthly series highlights researchers who have taken existing data and found clever ways to reuse the data or generate new findings. A different NIH institute or center will also share its data science activities each month.