Decoding the secrets of life with AI - with Mikhail Burtsev

Find out how AI is helping to decipher genomes, uncover the secrets of human biology, and accelerate medical discoveries.

This lecture was recorded at the Ri on 7 July 2025, in partnership with the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

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Artificial Intelligence is revolutionising our understanding of life. The DeepMind programme tackling the protein folding problem, AlphaFold, earned last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But that was just the beginning.

Join Mikhail Burtsev for a tour of the leading-edge biological applications of AI, including his own, that are now making complex biological insights more accessible than ever before. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are trained on human language, but these new AI models are instead fed billions of real DNA sequences, allowing them to perform astonishing feats like designing new biological molecules – or even whole new bacterial genomes. Their ultimate goal is to solve perhaps the most fundamental problem in all of biology – reading and understanding life’s genetic blueprint from beginning to end.

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Mikhail Burtsev is a Landau AI Fellow at the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences. He studied microelectronics at the Moscow Power Engineering Institute, before doing his PhD in computer science at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics. He was Scientific Director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute in Moscow, and set up and ran the Neural Nets and Deep Learning Laboratory at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Under his leadership, it developed the award-winning open-source conversational AI framework, DeepPavlov. His research focuses on the mathematics behind more intelligent AI, including continual learning and memory augmented neural networks, as well as AI assisted maths.

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