Nobel Awards (Prizes) 2024

Nobel Prize in Physics 2024

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 to John J. Hopfield (Princeton University, NJ, USA), and Geoffrey E. Hinton (University of Toronto, Canada) “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”.

John Hopfield invented a network that uses a method for saving and recreating patterns. We can imagine the nodes as pixels. The Hopfield network utilizes physics that describes a material’s characteristics due to its atomic spin – a property that makes each atom a tiny magnet. The network as a whole is described in a manner equivalent to the energy in the spin system found in physics and is trained by finding values for the connections between the nodes so that the saved images have low energy. When the Hopfield network is fed a distorted or incomplete image, it methodically works through the nodes and updates their values so the network’s energy falls. The network thus works stepwise to find the saved image that is most like the imperfect one it was fed with.

Geoffrey Hinton used the Hopfield network as the foundation for a new network that uses a different method: the Boltzmann machine. This can learn to recognize characteristic elements in a given type of data. Hinton used tools from statistical physics, the science of systems built from many similar components. The machine is trained by feeding it examples that are likely to arise when it is run. The Boltzmann machine can be used to classify images or create new examples of the type of pattern on which it was trained. Hinton has built upon this work, helping initiate the current explosive development of machine learning.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 with one half to David Baker (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA) “for computational protein design” and the other half jointly to Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper (both are from Google DeepMind, London, UK) “for protein structure prediction”

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 is about pro­teins, life’s ingenious chemical tools. David Baker has succeeded with the almost impossible feat of building entirely new kinds of proteins. Demis Hassabis and John Jumper have developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem: predicting proteins’ complex structures. These discoveries hold enormous potential.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024 was given to Victor Ambros (Affiliation at the time of the award: UMass Chan Medical School, Worcester, MA, USA) and Gary Ruvkun (Affiliation at the time of the award: Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA, USA; Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA) for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation.

The information stored within our chromosomes can be likened to an instruction manual for all cells in our body. Every cell contains the same chromosomes, so every cell contains the same set of genes and the same set of instructions. Yet, different cell types, such as muscle and nerve cells, have very distinct characteristics. How do these differences arise? The answer lies in gene regulation, which allows each cell to select only the relevant instructions. This ensures that only the correct set of genes is active in each cell type.