The John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton Nobel Prizes in Physics and Artificial Neural Networks: A Brief History of the Physics and Medicine of Two Nobel Laureates
STOCKHOLM — John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics Tuesday for discoveries and inventions that formed the building blocks of machine learning.
Ellen Moons, a member of the Nobel committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”
She stated that networks have been used to advance research of physics and have become a part of our daily lives in facial recognition and language translation.
The first split-second glimpse into the world of spinning electrons was provided by three scientists who won the physics prize last year.
The medicine prize was awarded to Americans Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun for their discovery of tiny bits of genetic material that served as on and off switches inside cells that control what they do and when they do it.
The prize has a cash award of over one million Swedish kronor from a bequest by the award’s creator. It has been awarded 117 times. The laureates are invited to receive their awards at ceremonies on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Nobel announcements continue with the chemistry physics prize on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The economics award will be announced on the same day as the peace prize.
David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper: Building new proteins from the ground using artificial intelligence and nature’s multi-tool
Scientists want to learn how to use nature’s multi-tool for their own purposes and that’s why they’ve been trying to build new proteins. This is the problem that David Baker solved,” he added. He developed computational tools that enable scientists to design spectacular new proteins with entirely novel shapes and functions, which is opening endless possibilities for benefit to humankind.
Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.
STOCKHOLM — The Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded Wednesday to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for their work with proteins, the building blocks of life.