In conversation with Google DeepMind

Digital technologies have the potential to help us reimagine scientific discovery and create new pathways to impact.

Join the Director of CSIRO’s Data61, Jon Whittle, and Oleg Kovalevskiy from Google DeepMind in a conversation about AlphaFold - it's history, applications and plans for future development.

Dr Kovalevskiy is an applied scientist and researcher at Google DeepMind, the group behind AlphaFold, an AI system that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence.

Frequently listed among the watershed moments in the history of AI, AlphaFold has been used to predict the structure of more than 200 million proteins.

As part of the webinar, CSIRO’s Andrew Warden will present an update on a CSIRO structural biology project that has seen some exciting early results.

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Oleg Kovalevskiy:
Oleg Kovalevskiy is an Applied Scientist, focusing on structural biology and support of AlphaFold at Google DeepMind. Oleg started his career as a protein biochemist, receiving full “gene to structure” training at YSBL, University of York before going on to experimentally determine 8 structures now included within the Protein Data Bank (PDB). He subsequently focused on the development of automation software for macromolecular crystallography within Garib Murshudov’s group at MRC LMB in Cambridge, later becoming a CCP4 Core team member.

Jon Whittle:
Jon Whittle is Director of CSIRO's Data61, the digital and data science arm of Australia's national science agency. With around 1000 staff and affiliates, Data61 is one of the largest collections of R&D expertise in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science in the world. Prior to joining CSIRO’s Data61, Jon was Dean of the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, the largest university in Australia. He was named CEO Magazine's 2019 Education Executive of the Year. Jon is also a former Technical Area Lead at NASA, where he worked on software for NASA space missions. Jon is passionate about the role digital technologies can play in society. He has a world-leading reputation on how to adapt software development methods to fully take into account human values and ethics, so that we build software for a society we want rather than one we get by accident. Jon is also host of CSIRO's Everyday AI podcast, which provides a gentle introduction to AI and cuts through much of the hype surrounding this emerging technology.

Andrew Warden
Andrew Warden is a senior research scientist and has been with CSIRO for 19 years. He has expertise in chemistry, enzymology, biochemistry, and computational modelling of small molecules and proteins. He leads the Industrial Systems Biology team in the CSIRO Environment Business Unit and is leading the Data-Driven Molecular Design Theme in the Advanced Engineering Biology Future Science Platform. His recent achievements in protein engineering and structure/function elucidation in the last 5 years are exemplified in publications in high-impact journals such as Frontiers in Plant Science (2017), Nature Scientific Reports (2018), PNAS (2020), Viruses (2017), Nature Catalysis (2019) and others.