One sweltering day in 2001, undergraduate computer science major Scott Riggs sought refuge from the Florida sun in the shade of the Keen Building, home to Florida State University’s Department of Physics. That day happened to be the biennial Flying Circus of Physics, an open-house event spotlighting physics phenomena through hands-on experiments.
One demonstration caught Riggs’ eye: A piece of high-temperature superconductor called yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO, gently levitating above a rare-earth magnet. When Riggs turned to a nearby professor, whom he would later know as nuclear physicist Mark Riley, and asked how the object was floating, he was shocked by the answer. They didn’t know.
“I was baffled,” Riggs said. “Here was a physical object doing what looked like magic, and the world’s smartest minds had no idea why. I soon switched my major to physics.”
The Orange Park, Florida native, who was originally unsure about even attending college, spent the following decade immersed in research at FSU, earning his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in physics by 2010, and studying YBCO at the National Science Foundation-funded, FSU-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
“His enthusiasm impressed me,” said physics professor Gregory Boebinger, Riggs’ doctoral adviser and former National MagLab director. “Scott was my first graduate student, and we operated more as collaborators than as a traditional professor-and-student hierarchy.”
Enthusiasm aside, Riggs worked hard and was driven by curiosity and the desire to learn, which came to bear when he launched into a research collaboration, collecting data over a holiday break. When analyzing the data with collaborators, they found what appeared to be signals of fractional states, a rare phase of matter. Stumped by what they saw, he called Boebinger.
"Scott has a keen ability to absorb and synthesize disparate information ... He’s one of the best I know at understanding the broad implications of what he’s learning to propose creative paths forward."
— Gregory Boebinger, FSU Professor of Physics
“There was one issue: I forgot to tell Greg I was even in this collaboration, let alone writing a paper,” Riggs said. “To this day, Greg likes to joke — fondly, I hope — that it was the first time a graduate student invited him into a collaboration.”
The collaboration resulted in Riggs’ most-cited publication and a postdoctoral offer from Stanford University, California. From 2010 to 2014, he learned to synthesize high-temperature superconductors, a skill he brought with him when a research faculty position opened at the National MagLab in 2014.
Back in Tallahassee, Riggs saw the early potential of applying machine learning to revolutionize materials discovery and wondered how artificial intelligence tools emerging from computer science could help solve the types of complex physical problems he’d grappled with in physics. In 2016, he chased that intuition back into the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, heading up an AI implementation team of like-minded researchers in the semiconductor industry.
“My teams built systems that achieved 30 times faster discovery cycles, the first stage of successful product development, for semiconductor companies,” Riggs said. “My time on the experimental frontlines taught me an important lesson: Standard ‘black box’ AI, which uses algorithms to make decisions without showing how it reaches them, is fundamentally insufficient for engineering adoption.”
