Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt will address the inaugural Shanghai Master Forum on Science on Tuesday.

Michael Levitt, the 2013 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, will open the Shanghai Master Forum on Science on Tuesday with a speech on "AI for Science."

The forum is a new initiative created by a number of institutions, including the Shanghai Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, Fudan University and the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission.

It aims to support the city's attempts to establish itself as a global scientific and technological innovation hub, as well as become a source of fresh scientific discoveries, technological advances, industrial trends and development ideas.

The program's academic board will choose 100 candidates from the recipients of global science honors such as the Nobel Prize, the Turing Award, the Fields Medal, the Wolf Prize and the Lasker Awards. It will be held six times a year, with a keynote speaker discussing the latest in the world of science and technology.

Levitt will discuss artificial intelligence and innovation in biomedicine, as well as share the most recent discoveries in cutting-edge computational biological research with two other speakers.

"AI technology has inspired the development of new tools, methods, and concepts, which has provided strong momentum for the development of other disciplines ranging from mathematics and physics to chemistry, material science, life science and medical science," said Ma Yugang, president assistant of Fudan University and a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

"AI-enabled research has become a trend for multidisciplinary studies and integrated innovation, particularly in biomedicine. Computational biology is becoming increasingly relevant in research areas such as gene protein analysis and comparative genome analysis."

The three speakers will discuss how core AI technologies may drive basic research and support important scientific advances, he said.

Levitt, a South African-born biophysicist, is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a structural biology professor at Stanford University in the United States. He and Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems."

Levitt joined Fudan University in 2018, where he established the Multiscale Research Institute of Complex Systems.

According to Ma, Levitt will demonstrate how computational biology evolved from a marginal field to a leading discipline and shed light on scientific development as well as the relationship between "useless" basic sciences and "useful" applied sciences.

Co-speaker Jianpeng Ma, a tenured professor at Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University, is a biophysics pioneer and leading expert in developing computational methods that have significantly expanded the ability to simulate, model and refine flexible biomolecular systems. His accomplishments were recognized in 2004 with the Welch Foundation's Norman Hackerman Award for Chemical Research.

He joined Fudan with Levitt in 2018 and is now the director of MRICS.

Ma will discuss the institute's progress as well as the role AI is playing in the creation of novel medicines.

Yuan Qi, director of Fudan University's Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Industrial Research Institute and former vice president of Alibaba, chief scientist of Ant AI, and head of Ant Financial Services Group's artificial intelligence department, is the other co-speaker.

Qi joined Fudan last year and will highlight how AI may be used to enhance economic growth in sectors such as pharmaceutical development, life science, meteorology and energy.

The forum will be held at the Xianghui Hall in Fudan University's Handan Road Campus and will be livestreamed online. Those interested can participate in the event by scanning the QR codes below.