ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter gives a brief overview of the broad aims and methods of scientific discovery across disciplines and contextualises the currently ongoing digital transformation of scientific research. This far-reaching methodological shift has the potential to bring about a new unification within and between bodies of knowledge and practice and radically speed up the discovery process. The chapter also broadly introduces the different types of artificial intelligence technologies that are relevant for scientific research, including traditional symbolic approaches to knowledge representation and automated reasoning, and the recently much advanced machine learning as exemplified by artificial neural networks.
