This month, Dr. Ashirbani Saha writes about the growing relationships between traditional and Artificial Intelligence (AI) approaches to research.
Hello BRIGHT Run Family,
I hope you are doing well.
I will miss Dr. Juliet Daniel, who died in May. I remember our first meeting and her beautiful smile. She inspired me as a scientist, a colleague, and a member of the BRIGHT Run family. She supported me in building my program when I started at McMaster in 2021.
I will be completing my five years at McMaster this month.
A seminal change has taken over the past five years in terms of how we perceive, work with, and use AI. Particularly, we have seen remarkable progress in AI-based content generation (which involves text, photo, audio, video).
AI has been supporting research as well and in March 2026, a research study was published on AI Scientist (Towards end-to-end automation of AI research | Nature). This is an AI system that can come up with research ideas, write and run computer codes, carry out experiments, analyze and visualize results, and write a full research paper.
The authors of the paper also created an Automatic AI reviewer that can review the AI Scientist’s work like a human reviewer. One of the papers generated by the AI Scientist even passed peer-review. The AI Scientist performed computational experiments only. In short, the technology worked but with flaws, and in the future, things are expected to get better.
This April, Environment Canada switched to a hybrid weather forecasting model involving both traditional physics-based and modern AI-based techniques to predict weather patterns (Canada to launch hybrid AI weather model to strengthen forecasting for severe weather – Canada.ca).
In both of those examples, there is a handshake taking place between traditional and AI-based approaches. Such a handshake is also taking place in our team’s work on the Breast Cancer Learning Health System at Hamilton Health Sciences. I hope to disclose more of that interesting science later this year.
We are in the middle of the year already and only three more months to the BRIGHT Run!
Stay well.
Best,
Ashirbani
Dr. Ashirbani Saha is the first holder of the BRIGHT Run Breast Cancer Learning Health System Chair, a permanent research position established by the BRIGHT Run in partnership with McMaster University.
