Building Scalable Agentic Systems for Science with Academy
Alok Kamatar (University of Chicago)
October 15, 2025
11:00-11:30 PST / 14:00-14:30 EST / 20:00-20:30 CEST
Agentic systems, in which diverse agents cooperate to tackle challenging problems, are exploding in popularity in the AI community. However, the agentic frameworks used to build these systems have not previously enabled use with research cyberinfrastructure. In this talk, I will introduce Academy, a modular and extensible middleware designed to deploy autonomous agents across the federated research ecosystem, including HPC systems, experimental facilities, and data repositories. I will situate Academy in the landscape of existing agentic frameworks and discuss how the design of Academy addresses the unique needs of scientific agents. Finally, I will present use-cases of agentic workflows and show an example of how we used Academy to build a more intelligent and efficient workflow for materials design.
RegisterAbout the Authors
Alok Kamatar
Graduate Student, University of Chicago
Alok Kamatar is a 4th year Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago advised by Ian Foster and Kyle Chard. Broadly, he is interested in building systems to enable faster and more efficient science. He is currently working on building Academy: a framework for integrating "Agents" with federated research infrastructure and exploring the associated systems challenges.
