Source : INDIA TODAY NEWS
If you watch a documentary about DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis that Google recently aired on YouTube, in the room full of engineers there is one Indian. The same person last night made a major announcement, detailing the latest breakthrough DeepMind has made in mapping and detailing human DNA. The person is Pushmeet Kohli, currently working as DeepMind VP and Google Cloud Chief Scientist. He is also an NIT Warangal graduate.
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The announcement is breathtaking in its scope. Imagine having a map of human DNA so detailed that scientists could see every single letter in our genetic code. That is what Google DeepMind is trying to build with its new AlphaGenome Atlas.
Google says this AI-powered Atlas will help scientists predict the possible effects of all 9 billion single-letter changes that can occur in the human genome, allowing researchers to investigate genetic diseases and better understand how our DNA works. While the project is the work of a larger DeepMind team, one of the senior researchers behind it is Pushmeet Kohli.
Kohli currently leads DeepMind’s AI for Science and Strategic Initiatives Unit, a team that uses AI to tackle some of science’s biggest problems, from biology and materials science to mathematics, software and fusion. AlphaGenome is one of their biggest AI-led projects.
But before becoming a senior researcher at Google DeepMind, Kohli’s journey began in India. He was born in India and completed his schooling and graduation here before moving abroad to pursue higher studies and build a career in research.
From NIT Warangal to Google DeepMind
While Kohli does not have the IIT tag on him, he graduated from another of India’s prestigious engineering institutions, the National Institute of Technology, Warangal. From NIT he got his degree in B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering.
He later moved to the UK, where he completed a PhD in computer vision at Oxford Brookes University in 2007 and later worked as a postdoctoral associate at the University of Cambridge. His career in research then took him to Microsoft Research, where he spent around a decade and eventually became Director of Research for the Cognition group.
In 2017, Kohli joined Google, where he became Vice Price President of Research at Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist at Google Cloud. His work at Google’s AI labs has since spanned areas including machine learning, computer vision, computational biology and AI systems.
Pushmeet Kohli at Google DeepMind
Over the years at DeepMind, Kohli has worked on some of the lab’s biggest AI-for-science projects alongside its founder Demis Hassabis, including on Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve, AlphaTensor and AlphaMissense. His latest work is around the AlphaGenome Atlas, which Google hopes will give scientists a new way to understand the billions of possible changes hidden in human DNA. Kohli was also named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people in AI in 2023.
What is Google building with AlphaGenome Atlas?
As for Kohli and his team’s latest project, the newly announced AlphaGenome Atlas is essentially a searchable map of the possible effects of changes in human DNA. The human genome contains around 3 billion DNA base pairs, but scientists still do not fully understand what much of this genetic code does.
DeepMind says it has used its AlphaGenome AI model to predict the molecular impact of all 9 billion possible single-letter changes in the human genome. Those predictions have been put into the new AlphaGenome Atlas, creating a dataset of around 1 petabyte — more than 30 times larger than the AlphaFold Database.
Scientists can now use this Atlas to look up genetic changes that could be linked to diseases, compare the predicted effects of different variants and identify those changes which need closer investigation in the lab.
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SOURCE :- TIMES OF INDIA
