How Can Autonomous Swarms of AI Agents Help Academic Research?

Speaker: Professor Baochun LI
Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Toronto
and
Visiting Professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Title: How Can Autonomous Swarms of AI Agents Help Academic Research?

Date: Monday, 11 May 2026

Time: 4:00pm - 5:00pm

Venue: Room 2503 (via lift 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:

In March 2026, Andrej Kaparthy predicted our future: "Research is now entirely the domain of autonomous swarms of AI agents running across compute cluster megastructures in the skies." While this sounds like science fiction, I argue that it may arrive before we know it (well, sans the "in the skies" part). At the very least, I believe that the "swarm of AI agents" can help accelerate the pace of academic research substantially, and in particular reproducible research with clearly defined benchmarks. In this talk, I will share with you why I think this is the case. Using both slide narratives and live demos, I will introduce how I drive a swarm of AI agents to effectively accelerate my recent research on Days, a discrete-event network simulator written in Rust. With such a swarm of AI agents, our imagination — rather than time or execution — becomes the limit when it comes to academic research.

Biography:

Baochun Li received his B.Engr. degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, China, in 1995 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, in 1997 and 2000. Since 2000, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he is currently a Professor. He holds the Bell Canada Endowed Chair in Computer Engineering since August 2005. His current research interests include cloud computing, security and privacy, distributed machine learning, federated learning, and networking.

Dr. Li has co-authored more than 500 research papers, with a total of over 29000 citations, an H-index of 90 and an i10-index of 367, according to Google Scholar Citations. He was the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Award in the Field of Communications Systems in 2000, the Multimedia Communications Best Paper Award from the IEEE Communications Society in 2009, the University of Toronto McLean Award in 2009, the Best Paper Award from IEEE INFOCOM in 2023, and the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award in 2024. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada, and a Fellow of IEEE.