{"type":"ScholarlyArticle","title":"Adaptive Experimental Design to Accelerate Scientific Discovery and Engineering Design","authors":[{"name":"Aryan Deshwal","slug":"aryan-deshwal","given":"Aryan","family":"Deshwal","affiliation":""}],"abstract":"Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning hold immense potential to accelerate scientific discovery and engineering design. A fundamental challenge in these domains involves efficiently exploring a large space of designs or hypotheses using expensive experiments in a resource-efficient manner. This paper surveys novel adaptive experimental design methods to address this broad challenge. Specifically, we discuss new probabilistic modeling and decision-making techniques that are applicable in small data settings. These approaches have shown substantial improvements in sample-efficiency, particularly for black-box optimization over high-dimensional combinatorial spaces (e.g., sequences and graphs) and a variety of goals ranging from multiobjective to multi-fidelity optimization. This paper outlines key methods and their real-world sustainability applications in areas such as nanoporous materials discovery, hardware design, surfactant design, and additive manufacturing.","doi":"10.24963/ijcai.2026/904","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/904","pdf":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/0904.pdf","markdown":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/904.md","bibtex":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/bibtex/904","volume":{"slug":"2026","title":"Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence","short_title":"IJCAI 2026","url":"https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2026/","year":2026,"location":"Bremen, Germany","dates":"15-21 August 2026","editors":"Diego Calvanese","isbn":"978-1-956792-09-6","publisher":"International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization","doi_prefix":"10.24963/ijcai.2026"},"section":"Early Career Spotlight","track":"Early Career Spotlight","number":904,"pages":{"first":8150,"last":8154},"keywords":["AI: Planning and Scheduling","AI: Search","AI: Uncertainty in AI","AI: Machine Learning"],"videos":[],"references":[],"license_note":"Copyright International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence."}