Luís Correia, LASIGE integrated member, was invited to write an opinion article in Público newspaper, October 9, 2024, on the Nobels for physics and chemistry and what they mean for Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The article begins as follows “On Monday, the world was surprised when the Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to two papers that were the origin of deep neural networks, the most powerful technique in AI today. This Tuesday, the surprise was no less when the Nobel Prize for Chemistry was announced for two works that use this same AI technique, applied to the study of proteins”.

After describing the award-winning works, Luís Correia emphasizes the importance of having applied AI “The work of the physics prize-winners used statistical physics models to develop partial models of how the brain works, which is most evident in the Hopfield networks, and came to constitute important models in computer science, particularly in the area of AI. The work of the chemistry prize-winners has used AI as an extremely powerful tool to solve chemistry problems, in a way that was not even envisioned a few years ago. These detailed studies of proteins have enormous potential in health and ecology”.

In brief, these awards reinforce the recognition of AI as a fundamental issue in our society, including research areas such as physics and chemistry.

You can read the opinion article here.