Artificial Intelligence to Win the Nobel Prize and Beyond: Creating the Engine for Scientific Discovery

artificial intelligence can deliver? What pushes the human race forward? Our civilization has advanced largely by scientific discoveries and the application of such knowledge. Therefore, I propose the launch of a grand challenge to develop AI systems that can make significant scientific discoveries. As a field with great potential social impacts, and one that suffers particularly from information overflow, along with the limitations of human cognition, I believe that the initial focus of this challenge should be on biomedical sciences, but it can be applied to other areas later. The challenge is “to develop an AI system that can make major scientific discoveries in biomedical sciences and that is worthy of a Nobel Prize and far beyond.” While recent progress in high-throughput “omics” measurement technologies has enabled us to generate vast quantities of data, scientific discoveries themselves still depend heavily upon individual intuition, while researchers are often overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data, as well as by the complexity of the biological phenomena they are seeking to understand. Even now, scientific discovery remains something akin to a cottage industry, but a great transformation seems to have begun. This is an ideal domain and the ideal timing for AI to make a difference. I anticipate that, in the near future, AI systems will make a succession of discoveries that have immediate medical implications, saving millions of lives, and totally changing the fate of the human race. Articles