LRIG Bay Area Fall Seminar and Exhibition 2026
South San Francisco Conference Center, South San Francisco, California
The Scientist Holds the Question, Not the Pipette: AI Agents and Robotic Labs in Practice
Carmen Kivisild speaks on connecting AI agents to robotic and cloud labs, with the time and cost measured against the traditional path. Free to attend, lunch included.
Register on EventbriteLRIG, the Laboratory Robotics Interest Group, is a volunteer-run community for people who automate laboratory work. The Bay Area chapter's fall seminar is its largest meeting of the year, drawing scientists from pharma, drug discovery, diagnostics and lab informatics alongside an exhibition floor of laboratory instrumentation. This is the third consecutive year the programme has been built around AI, and the chapter funds the day through its exhibition, which is why attendance is free.
On the day
The seminar runs from 11:00 to 16:00 Pacific at the South San Francisco Conference Center, four kilometres from SFO. Exhibits open at 11:00, lunch is served from 11:45, and the talks begin at 12:30. Registration is through Eventbrite and includes lunch. The exact slot in the running order is set by the organisers nearer the date.
The talk
For fifty years the tools of biology raced ahead while the bench stayed the same: a person, a pipette, one experiment at a time. The talk argues that this is now changing, and works through what it takes for one domain scientist to cover ground that used to need a computational biologist, an assay developer and a QC specialist between them. Describe an experiment in plain English, gather the relevant data, run the calculations, and produce an executable protocol matched to whichever lab is best equipped to run it, robotic, cloud, human or a mix. Results return with full provenance and sharpen the next round.
The argument is that as the price of an experiment falls toward reagents and automation, small teams start doing big science.