BioML Seminar 4.2 - Can agents analyze real-world spatial biology data?

​​​​​​​[IN PERSON EVENT IN BERKELEY]

​​​​​​​​​Join us for a new seminar from the BioML group in Machine Learning at Berkeley, sponsored by Amplify Partners. This week, we're excited to host Kenny Workman, CTO + Co-Founder at LatchBio!

​Talk Abstract
Spatial transcriptomics assays are rapidly increasing in scale and complexity, making computational analysis a major bottleneck in biological discovery. Although frontier AI agents have improved dramatically at software engineering and general data analysis, it remains unclear whether they can extract biological insight from messy, real-world spatial datasets. We introduce SpatialBench, a benchmark of 146 verifiable problems derived from practical spatial analysis workflows spanning five spatial technologies and seven task categories. Benchmark data on frontier models shows that base model accuracy remains low (20-38% across model families), with strong model-task and model-platform interactions. SpatialBench serves both as a measurement tool and a diagnostic lens for developing agents that can interact with real spatial datasets faithfully, transparently, and reproducibly.

Speaker Bio
Kenny Workman is the CTO + Co-Founder at LatchBio, a company building infrastructure for biological data analysis. He studied engineering at Berkeley and is interested in solving technical problems at the intersection of computing and biology.

​​