AI System Automates Coding for Scientific Research
A new AI tool named Empirical Research Assistance (ERA) has been developed to automate the creation of scientific software. This system, co-led by researchers from Google and Harvard, can outperform human-written programs, potentially speeding up scientific discovery. ERA utilizes advanced algorithms to refine code for specific scientific tasks, significantly reducing the time required for software development.
- ▪The AI system ERA can automatically write high-performance scientific software.
- ▪ERA combines the Google Gemini large language model with a search strategy to explore and refine code.
- ▪The system can integrate research ideas from papers or textbooks to enhance its software development process.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Harvard SEAS |
| Canonical URL | https://seas.harvard.edu/news/ai-system-automates-coding-scientific-research |
| Publication time | Tue, 26 May 2026 14:49:19 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-26T14:57:49.919Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-26T14:57:49.919Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | P8MJkVP5bA_s · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
News News Events All News Stories AI System Automates Coding for Scientific Research Empirical Research Assistance out-performs software written by experts By Anne J. Manning | Press contact May 19, 2026 FacebookTwitterEmailLinkedIn Key Takeaways A new AI tool called Empirical Research Assistance (ERA) can automatically write high-performance scientific software. ERA could significantly accelerate scientific discovery across many domains. A research team at Google co-led by Michael Brenner, Catalyst Professor of Applied Mathematics and Physics at the Harvard John A.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Harvard SEAS.
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