British computer scientist Sir Demis Hassabis awarded chemistry Nobel prize

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A British computer scientist has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced.

Sir Demis Hassabis, who is the chief executive and and co-founder of London-based artificial intelligence start-up Google DeepMind, received the honour alongside John Jumper, a senior research scientist at the company, and David Baker, of the University of Washington.

In 2020, Sir Demis and Dr Jumper presented an AI model called AlphaFold2.

With its help, they have been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.

Since their breakthrough, AlphaFold2 has been used by more than two million people from 190 countries.

Sir Demis Hassabis was born in London in 1976 and received his PhD in from University College London.

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