Ulrike Attenberger, Professor of Radiology at MedUni Vienna, and Michael Bronstein, DeepMind Professor of AI at the University of Oxford and Founding Director of AITHYRA, talked about current developments in artificial intelligence and how to make use of it in clinical practice and biomedical research.

From Euclid to Nobel: biology in the age of AI
"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 key in the ancient geometry of Euclid that persisted for two millennia as the only known geometry and also a crucial element of Felix Klein's Erlangen Programme in the late 19th century, which broke the Euclidean monopoly by revolutionising geometry and creating novel branches of mathematics. Today, symmetry comes to our aid in bringing a geometric unification of deep learning. In his lecture, Michael Bronstein, presented a common mathematical framework, "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. He explored the geometric ideas underpinning the recent successes in protein design that were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and showed the current cutting edge of the field.

AITHYRA, the institute’s name created in collaboration with AI
To embody the spirit of AI and biomedicine, Greek mythology was used as inspiration and linked to the goals of the new institute – and AITHYRA was born. According to the backstory generated by AI, she is the daughter of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and Asclepius, the god of medicine, and is therefore its patron saint and source of inspiration. The institute named after her aims to carry the history of biomedical research into the future.

It was an honor for Michael Bronstein to be invited by Rector Markus Müller to give a lecture at the 2025 Day of the Medical University of Vienna. May a lot of fruitful collaborations between the MedUni and AITHYRA, the new institute of the OeAW supported by the Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation Mainz, fulfill the high expectations of AI in medicine and research!