Dr. Syed Bahauddin Alam, Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering (NPRE) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was invited as a plenary speaker at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Artificial Intelligence for Robust Engineering and Science (AIRES) forum, held in September at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The DOE’s AIRES series is a flagship platform that unites experts from government, academia, and industry to develop trustworthy, interpretable, and energy-efficient AI for critical scientific missions. More than 100 attendees from DOE national laboratories, major technology companies, and leading universities convened to identify key research challenges and investment priorities shaping the future of robust AI for science and engineering.
The 2025 forum was organized around three major tracks:
- Foundational AI Agent Technologies for Energy Systems: advancing reinforcement learning, multi-agent architectures, and human-aligned reasoning frameworks for safe, autonomous decision-making.
- Digital Twin Integration and Simulation Environments: exploring multimodal physics-informed modeling, real-time co-simulation, and bridging simulation-to-reality gaps.
- Applications and Case Studies in Energy Dominance: showcasing real-world AI applications across grid optimization, nuclear operations, critical infrastructure protection, energy storage, and cybersecurity.
Dr. Alam’s plenary talk, “Toward Foundation Models: Reimagining Digital Twins with Agentic AI and Real-Time Sensing in Energy Systems,” was one of four invited plenary presentations, joining distinguished speakers from Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE). His work highlighted NPRE/UIUC’s pioneering research on foundation-model-enabled digital twins for autonomous and resilient energy systems. The presentation introduced methods for unifying multimodal sensing, physics-aware operator learning, and neuromorphic efficiency into deployable AI frameworks capable of real-time inference across complex physical environments.
The meeting was hosted by ORNL’s AI Initiative under the leadership of Dr. Prasanna Balaprakash and Dr. Pradeep Ramuhalli, and featured participants from Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, as well as researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and the University of Tennessee.
Other plenary speakers at AIRES-6 included Nelli Babayan (Microsoft), Sean Lee (NVIDIA), and Soumyendu Sarkar (HPE), underscoring the strategic convergence of national-lab, academic, and industry efforts toward developing robust, interpretable, and scalable AI systems for science and energy.
For more information, please visit the AIRES website.
Dr. Alam has been appointed to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) committee on Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery and Innovation: Opportunities Across the Department of Energy. He has been named as the National AI leader in the University of Illinois’s official response to White House AI Action Plan. For details about Dr. Alam’s research on foundation models for energy and nuclear systems, refer to https://npre.illinois.edu or https://npre.illinois.edu/people/profile/alams.