The past decade has seen incredible advances in artificial intelligence. DeepMind has been in the vanguard of many of these big breakthroughs, pioneering the development of self-learning systems like AlphaGo, the first program to beat the world champion at the complex game of Go. Games have proven to be a great training ground for developing and testing AI algorithms, but the aim at DeepMind has always been to build general learning systems ultimately capable of solving important problems in the real world.

We’re on the cusp of an exciting new era in science, with AI poised to be a powerful tool for accelerating scientific discovery itself. We recently demonstrated this potential with our AlphaFold system, a solution to the 50-year grand challenge of protein structure prediction, culminating in the release of the most accurate and complete picture of the human proteome and release of the predicted structures of over 200 million proteins — nearly all catalogued proteins known to science.

Demis Hassabis is the Founder and CEO of DeepMind, one of the world’s leading AI research companies, and he is the Founder and CEO of Isomorphic Labs, a digital biology company that is redefining drug discovery with the power of artificial intelligence. Both companies are part of Alphabet.

DeepMind was founded in 2010 and has been at the forefront of the field ever since, producing landmark research breakthroughs such as AlphaGo, the first program to beat the world champion at the complex game of Go, and AlphaFold, which was heralded as a solution to the 50-year grand challenge of protein folding.

The AlphaFold breakthrough led Demis to found Isomorphic Labs in 2021, to apply AI and computational methods to drug discovery, making it possible to develop new targeted drugs faster than ever before. Isomorphic Labs is based in Lausanne and London.

Demis was a chess and programming child prodigy who coded the classic AI simulation game Theme Park aged 17. After graduating from Cambridge University in computer science with a double first, he founded pioneering videogames company Elixir Studios, and completed a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at UCL investigating memory and imagination processes.

His work has been cited over 100,000 times and has featured in Science’s top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year on 5 separate occasions. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2017 he featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people, and in 2018 he was awarded a CBE. 

12:15 pm
Welcome address
Presentation of the Dr. Honoris Causa 2023 Award to Demis Hassabis
Martin Vetterli, President of EPFL

12:20 pm
Campus Lecture
“Using AI to Accelerate Scientific Discovery”
Demis Hassabis, Founder and CEO of DeepMind

1:00 pm
Q&A

1:15 pm
Cocktail