This year’s Nobel Prizes were a big event for the world of artificial intelligence. Pioneers in the field of AI, Geoff Hinton and John Hopfield, won the Nobel Prize under the umbrella of physics for their seminal work in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The day after, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be shared by Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis and Google DeepMind director John Jumper, along with David Baker, who heads the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington.
Both Google DeepMind staffers, along with their team, are associated with the now-famous AlphaFold software. This is a multi-layered artificial neural network that uses deep learning (a subtype of machine learning) to determine the final spatial arrangement of a protein from its primary structure, and is now a daily tool for molecular biologists around the world. In addition to accelerating basic research on protein structures, this artificial intelligence helps predict suitable targets for drugs and reveals the structure of proteins on the surface of various pathogens (including the causative agents of COVID-19, leishmaniasis, sleeping sickness, and malaria, etc.).
“When AlphaFold came out a few years ago, we were stumped. For decades, the rapid development of genome sequencing has been spewing data at us from which the primary structure of proteins encoded by particular organisms can be determined with relative ease. However, determining from this information the spatial arrangement of protein molecules, which is crucial for their function, is a tricky task that until recently was only handled by very sophisticated and expensive experimental approaches. Thanks to AlphaFold, everything is suddenly different. For example, we can play with protein structures even from organisms that no one would give us money to experiment on. Moreover, with the advent of the latest version of AlphaFold, new possibilities are opening up for studying protein interactions with other molecules – simply on the computer instead of in lengthy and often frustrating experiments. It is amazing that behind the great features of AlphaFold there is also a Czech footprint in the person of Augustin Žídek, who has been involved in its development for a long time and is a major contributor. I am extremely pleased that Augustin accepted the invitation to combine one of his returns to his native region with a lecture in our regular seminar,” says Professor Marek Eliáš from the Department of Biology and Ecology at the Faculty of Science of the OU.
Former high school student from Frýdlant nad Ostravicí as Research Engineer at Google DeepMind
Augustin Žídek graduated from the Gymnasium in Frýdlant nad Ostravicí, from where, thanks to a scholarship from The Kellner Family Foundation, he headed to the University of Cambridge in the UK, where as a scholarship holder he studied for a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Computer Science. His studies focused on natural language processing, systems and security, and especially artificial intelligence. This became his daily bread after graduation when he started working as a research engineer at Google DeepMind, an artificial intelligence research company.
“Within DeepMind, I work on the team that developed AlphaFold. As a research engineer, I’m somewhere between research and programming, and it’s a role that suits me very well – on the one hand, I’m doing research, and on the other hand, I’m solving interesting technical problems,” Augustin Žídek commented on his job a few years ago.
On October 29th, he will present a seminar on Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3 at the Faculty of Science of the University of Ostrava (Chittussiho 10, room M427) from 15:50.
Source for the opening photo: by Greylag Aghast, available online from this link
Source: the University of Ostrava
Read more here: A member of the team of the last Nobel Prize winners is heading to Ostrava University – OU@live
