Listed below are upcoming seminars, workshops and other events of interest to the staff of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and to our research partners.
Please consult with the event host/contact for connection details if you wish to remotely join any event marked as "Virtual" or "Hybrid".
This event listing was last updated 2026-09-03. All times shown are New York City local.
- September 9, 2026
- 12:45 p.m. to 2 p.m. — Hybrid
- GISS Lunch Seminar
- Topic: Can AI Autonomously Modernize Complex Legacy Scientific Software?
- Speaker: Mark Carroll and Jordan Caraballo-Vega (NASA GSFC)
- More info: Abstract
- Host/Contact: Joseph Kelly
GISS Lunch Seminar
Speaker: Mark Carroll and Jordan Caraballo-Vega (NASA GSFC)
Title: Can AI Autonomously Modernize Complex Legacy Scientific Software?
This is a hybrid presentation, presented both in-person and on-line. Please consult with event host Joseph Kelly for connection details if you wish to virtually attend.
Abstract:
Modernizing legacy Earth system models for emerging computing architectures remains a significant challenge. While interactive AI coding assistants have demonstrated the ability to accelerate software development, recent advances in agentic AI offer the potential to automate more complex software engineering tasks, including code translation, testing, validation and workflow orchestration. Realizing this potential requires coordinated multi-agent systems and rigorous methods for evaluating the scientific fidelity and trustworthiness of AI-generated code. Recent advances in agentic AI provide an opportunity to move beyond code completion toward autonomous scientific software engineering. In this work, we investigate to what extent coordinated AI agents can modernize complex Earth-system software, including legacy components of the GEOS atmospheric model by translating scientific code into GPU-accelerated implementations, verifying both functional and scientific correctness, and orchestrating testing and validation workflows. Beyond automation, we evaluate the trustworthiness, explainability, and scientific fidelity of AI-generated software to determine where these systems are already effective, and where human expertise remains essential. This presentation examines the current state of autonomous AI for scientific software modernization through the lens of a real-world Earth system modeling application. We describe the agentic architecture, present our evaluation methodology and initial results, discuss the challenges that remain for trustworthy AI-assisted software engineering, and outline a path toward scalable modernization of legacy scientific codes.
[ Close ]
Meetings and Workshops
No forthcoming meetings, workshops, and other special events organized by GISS staff members have been announced.
Seminars and Colloquia
Almost all seminars may be attended virtually over the Internet, and interested persons should contact the event host for connection details.
Lunch Seminars usually take place on Wednesdays at 1 p.m. two or three times per month, mostly during the academic year. These presentations are usually hybrid, i.e., in-person with option to attend virtually.
Sea Level Rise Seminars occur on Tuesday mornings at 11 a.m., with virtual presentations by scientists from numerous research institutions. This seminar is two or three times per month, year-round.
ROCKE-3D Seminars discussing topics of interest to exoplanetary and paleoclimate researchers are held from time to time.
Videos of many past seminar presentations and other presentations may be found on YouTube.
