Since the release of ChatGPT late last year, the world has finally embraced vector embeddings and many organisations (from hedge funds to giant retailers) have been experimenting with vector databases. This is because vector embeddings, a component at the heart of large language models, open-up the ability to not only compress information but also to drastically transform search and knowledge retrieval. In this session we will put a spotlight on the embedding revolution that has taken over natural language processing, computer vision, network science and explain how enterprises can build better systems to understand, interact with, and sell to their customers.

Scientific discovery hinges on the effective integration of metadata, which refers to a set of 'cognitive' operations such as determining what information is relevant for inquiry, and data, which encompasses physical operations such as observation and experimentation. This talk introduces the Causal Modelling Agent (CMA), a novel framework that synergizes the metadata-based reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the data-driven modelling of Deep Structural Causal Models (DSCMs) for the task of causal discovery. We evaluate the CMA's performance on a number of benchmarks, as well as on the real-world task of modelling the clinical and radiological phenotype of Alzheimer's Disease (AD). Our experimental results indicate that the CMA can outperform previous data-driven or metadata-driven approaches to causal discovery. In our real-world application, we use the CMA to derive new insights into the causal relationships among biomarkers of AD.