Three scientists, David Baker, Demi Hassabis and John Jamber, shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year, for their work on proteins.

Demis Hassabis was awarded 1/3 of the prize – together with John Jumper – “for the prediction of protein structure”.

The British scientist is of Cypriot descent, on his father’s side, while his mother is of Chinese descent from Singapore.

THE Demis Hassambis is an artificial intelligence researcher and neuroscientist, and for his work he has been honored with numerous awards.

In addition, he is a computer game designer and entrepreneur, best known as one of the founders of the company DeepMind, which was later bought by Google where Hassabis now works.

Genius since childhood – Tech Guru

Demis Hassambis was born on July 27, 1976, in London.

From childhood he was an excellent chess player, and held his rank matr at the age of 13 years old, with an Elo score of 2300. At the same time, he was the leader of many expeditions of the England children’s national chess team.

He finished school at the age of 16, and soon after worked as a game developer at Bullfrog Productions, on Syndicate and Theme Park games.

He then obtained his degree in computer science from his university Cambridge with distinction and for the next decade he continued to work as a computer game developer. In 1998 he founded company Elixir Studios.

In 2009 he continued his studies for a PhD at University College London in cognitive neuroscienceabout researching artificial intelligence algorithms that can emerge from human brain processes.

demi hasabis

Career

After earning his PhD, he continued research on neuroscience and artificial intelligence as a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

One of the most important publications he made during this time was the study in which he showed that patients with damage to the hippocampus of the brain, which causes amnesia, are unable to imagine themselves in new experiences, which linked the creative process of imagination with the re-creative process of retrieving episodic memory.

Based on this study, as well as its continuation in relation to functional magnetic resonance imaging, Hassambis developed a new theoretical model of episodic memory by identifying scene construction – production and retention in memory of a complex and compact situation – as a central process the which lies behind both memory and imagination.

This work of his received wide coverage by the international media and was classified as one of the 10 most important scientific discoveries from the journal Science.

DeepMind

In 2010, Hassabis together with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleiman co-founded the company DeepMind in London. The object of DeepMind was to solve intelligence and then use intelligence to solve everything else.

To this end, the company uses insights from the fields of neuroscience and machine learning along with the latest advances in computing power to build extremely powerful general-purpose algorithms that will lead to the creation of artificial general intelligence.

Hassabis predicts that artificial intelligence will be one of the most beneficial technologies ever to exist for humanity, yet significant ethical issues remain.