“If I have a thousand ideas a year, and only one turns out to be good, I am satisfied.” Alfred Nobel

Every October the new Nobel Prizes are announced, an award dedicated to the fields of physics, chemistry, psychology, medicine, literature, and peace. We as AI4b.io are extremely excited that two of the 2024 Nobel Prizes have rewarded outstanding research related to Artificial Intelligence.

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 has been awarded to John J. Hopfield (Princeton University, NJ, USA) and Geoffrey E. Hinton (University of Toronto, Canada). Both researchers developed foundational methods related to artificial neural networks, which is nowadays one of the most used techniques in machine learning. To read more about the science background in popular language, please refer to: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-physicsprize2024-2.pdf.

That artificial intelligence has paved the way for groundbreaking research in sciences is proven by the receivers of The Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024, which is shared between David Baker (University of Washington, Howard Hughes Medical Institute), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) and John M. Jumper (Google DeepMind).

David Baker and his research group work on protein design, and have been very successful in designing new proteins. These proteins can be used in various impactful industries. An AI model called AlphaFold2 led to an excellent breakthrough in solving the 50-year-old problem of predicting protein structures from amino acid sequences.  This AI model, developed by Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, is made publicly available and has been used by more than two million people worldwide. Read more about this research in the popular science background: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2024/10/popular-chemistryprize2024-3.pdf.

AI4b.io congratulates all the laureates and we are very much looking forward to the future of AI for (bio)science.