Will Bolton
Will Bolton
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Adversarial Fast-Moving Real-World Domains as Test Beds for Benchmarking AI Scientist Capabilities
A framework for benchmarking AI scientist capabilities using adversarial, fast-moving real-world domains, where expert practitioners independently produce observable ground truth after an information cutoff. Instantiated in Formula 1 car design for the 2026 regulations and Magic: The Gathering deck building, with frontier models ideating from pre-cutoff information only and their outputs scored against real innovations and Pro Tour decklists.
William Bolton
,
Philip Torr
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Code (F1)
Code (MTG)
Poster
ICML 2026: workshop papers and AI for Science meet-up
Presented two workshop papers at ICML 2026 (a spotlight at the GenBio workshop and a paper at the AI for Science workshop) and, together with the other Encode Fellows, organised an AI for Science meet-up.
Jul 10, 2026 – Jul 11, 2026
Seoul, South Korea
Paper: clinical-trial strategy
Poster: clinical-trial strategy
Paper: AI scientist test beds
Poster: AI scientist test beds
Learning Clinical-Trial Strategy: Offline Policy Training for Decision Agents
Framing oncology clinical development as an offline decision-making problem, where an agent predicts the next six-month trial portfolio of a drug programme from information available at the decision date. Built on a temporal dataset of 31.7k public records turned into 881 decision episodes across 45 historical programmes, used to train offline policies and compare them against frontier LLM agents on held-out drug, sponsor, drug-class and temporal splits.
William Bolton
,
Philip Torr
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Code
Dataset
Poster
Startups for AI x Science @ ICML 2026
Organised and hosted a breakfast gathering at ICML 2026 with my fellow Encode AI for Science Fellows, bringing together founders, researchers and builders working at the intersection of AI and science to discuss early-stage startups, the transition from research to commercialisation, and the infrastructure the field still needs.
Jul 8, 2026
Seoul, South Korea
William Bolton
,
McClain Thiel
,
Tim Reichelt
,
Jonathan Carter
A2A Net
Building infrastructure and tooling to let AI agents from different people and organisations work together in real time.
2026
William Bolton
,
Thomas Lynch
Website
Try it
Video
et al.
Building the interface for agent-driven science: a personalised discovery feed and self-improving knowledge base for researchers and their agents.
2026
William Bolton
,
Thomas Lynch
Website
Video
Building with ARIA: Unlocking an Innovation Ecosystem
Panelist at Nucleate UK’s Building with ARIA summit at the British Library, where I discussed my work during the Encode AI for Science Fellowship. The summit was a technical deep-dive into the ARIA (Advanced Research + Invention Agency) ecosystem, its programmes and opportunities to participate.
May 5, 2026
The British Library, London, UK
Frontier Biotech Tables: From Signal to Drug
Hosted ‘The AI Value Shift’ round table at Frontier Biotech Tables: From Signal to Drug, a facilitated discussion on where value shifts in drug development as AI makes therapeutic candidates faster and cheaper to generate, how AI may support clinical development, and what that means for business models built on defensibility.
Apr 16, 2026
IDEALondon, London, UK
Dementia Gap Map
An app that surfaces research gaps in dementia by connecting fragmented literature, genetics and clinical trial evidence.
2026
William Bolton
,
Thomas Lynch
Website
AI Scientists Need a Social Network
Blog post arguing that the speed and scale benefits are obvious, but perhaps the deeper opportunity for AI scientists will be in how they communicate and make science, for the first time, genuinely social.
William Bolton
,
Ben Williams
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