Hot Topics in Computing with Michael Bronstein: Geometric Deep Learning – from Euclid to Drug Design

Building 32, Patil/Kiva Seminar Room, 32-G449

Title: Geometric Deep Learning – from Euclid to Drug DesignAbstract: “Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty, and perfection.” This poetic definition comes from the great mathematician Hermann Weyl, credited with laying the foundation of our modern theory of the universe. Symmetry was a crucial element of the Erlangen Programme in the late 19th century that revolutionised geometry and created novel branches of mathematics. Today, symmetry comes to our help in bringing a geometric unification of deep learning. This lecture will presents a common mathematical framework, referred to as "Geometric deep learning", to study the most successful network architectures, giving a constructive procedure to build future machine learning in a principled way that could be applied in new domains such as biology, medicine, and drug design.Bio: Michael Bronstein is the DeepMind Professor of AI at the University of Oxford. He previously served as Head of Graph Learning Research at Twitter, professor at Imperial College London, and held visiting appointments at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. He is the recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, Royal Academy of Engineering Silver Medal, Turing World-Leading AI Research Fellowship, five ERC grants, two Google Faculty Research Awards, and two Amazon AWS ML Research Awards. He is a Member of the Academia Europaea, Fellow of IEEE, IAPR, BCS, and ELLIS, ACM Distinguished Speaker, and World Economic Forum Young Scientist. In addition to his academic career, Michael is a serial entrepreneur and founder of multiple startup companies, including Novafora, Invision (acquired by Intel in 2012), Videocites, and Fabula AI (acquired by Twitter in 2019). He is the Chief Scientist at VantAI and scientific advisor at Recursion Pharmaceuticals.