While scientific progress has historically reshaped our world, today’s most pressing challenges—from decoding complex biology for improved health to innovating sustainable energy solutions—demand a new catalyst. At Google DeepMind, we are pioneering the use of artificial intelligence to fundamentally alter the pace and scale of scientific discovery. This talk will delve into our strategy and showcase key breakthroughs where AI is not just accelerating research but also enabling entirely new questions across domains like biology (e.g., AlphaFold’s impact on structural biology), genomics, materials science, computer science and foundational mathematics. I will discuss the core AI methodologies driving these advancements and our vision for a future where AI acts as a powerful collaborator in humanity’s quest for knowledge.
Bio: Pushmeet Kohli is a principal scientist and research team leader at DeepMind. Before joining DeepMind, Pushmeet was the director of research at the Cognition group at Microsoft. During his 10 years at Microsoft, Pushmeet worked in Microsoft labs in Seattle, Cambridge and Bangalore and took a number of roles and duties including being technical advisor to Rick Rashid, the Chief Research Officer of Microsoft. Pushmeet’s research revolves around Intelligent Systems and Computational Sciences, and he publishes in the fields of Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Information Retrieval, and Game Theory. His current research interests include 3D Reconstruction and Rendering, Probabilistic Programming, Interpretable and Verifiable Knowledge Representations from Deep Models. He is also interested in Conversation agents for Task completion, Machine learning systems for Healthcare and 3D rendering and interaction for augmented and virtual reality. Pushmeet has won a number of awards and prizes for his research. His PhD thesis, titled “Minimizing Dynamic and Higher Order Energy Functions using Graph Cuts”, was the winner of the British Machine Vision Association’s “Sullivan Doctoral Thesis Award”, and was a runner-up for the British Computer Society’s “Distinguished Dissertation Award”. Pushmeet’s papers have appeared in Computer Vision (ICCV, CVPR, ECCV, PAMI, IJCV, CVIU, BMVC, DAGM), Machine Learning, Robotics and AI (NIPS, ICML, AISTATS, AAAI, AAMAS, UAI, ISMAR), Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH, Eurographics), and HCI (CHI, UIST) conferences. They have won awards in ICVGIP 2006, 2010, ECCV 2010, ISMAR 2011, TVX 2014, CHI 2014, WWW 2014 and CVPR 2015. His research has also been the subject of a number of articles in popular media outlets such as Forbes, Wired, BBC, New Scientist and MIT Technology Review. Pushmeet is a part of the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Distinguished Speaker Program.