Hi! My name is Carl Edwards, and I’m from Knoxville, Tennessee. I’m a PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where I’m advised by Professor Heng Ji. My research focuses on, with increasing specificity, AI4Science → NLP4Science → NLP4Chemistry → NLP for Controlling Molecular Design in cancer drugs, organic photovoltaics, etc.

The world faces an enormous number of problems in the coming decades on scales of complexity never-before-seen, in areas such as climate change, healthcare, and food security, each requiring innovative scientific solutions that are scalable, adaptable, and cost-effective. Further, we need to develop these solutions quickly. Under these conditions, vast quantities of information are being created at ever increasing rates. This flood of information leads to inefficiencies via duplication of effort while critical information is lost in the deluge of papers. To solve these problems, we need to be able to synthesize and understand massive scales of information. This motivates my high-level research direction: applying natural language processing (NLP) for scientific discovery. Specifically, I am currently interested in NLP for molecular and drug discovery, particularly by integrating natural language with molecules.

In terms of research interests, I am generally interested in models which leverage multiple modalities and domains of data centered around language. My research interests cover information extraction, information retrieval, natural language processing, representation learning, text mining, and transfer learning. In particular, my work seeks to apply these tools (and develop new ones!) to scientific texts to accelerate scientific discovery. I’m currently working on projects related to chemistry literature in association with the Molecule Maker Lab NSF AI Institute. In general, I’m passionate about language+multimodal for compositional function-level control of drugs, proteins, and material design.

News

• I’ll be joining Genentech in August as a Senior AI Research Scientist! I’m planning to more closely align multimodal models and agents with real-world drug discovery campaigns.

Links

The first “Language + Molecules” workshop at ACL24 and dataset.

The comprehensive “Language + Molecules” Tutorial, video, slides, and material.