Google Accelerated Science

Antimalarial drug-resistance is driving calls for discovery of drugs with new mechanisms of action. Current cell-based drug screens are restricted to binary live/dead readouts with no provision for mechanism prediction. Machine learning methods are increasingly being used to improve information extraction from imaging data. Such methods, however, work poorly with heterogeneous phenotypes and...

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is widely seen as a possible usage of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. We analyze the algorithm as a bang-bang protocol with fixed total time and a randomized greedy optimization scheme. We investigate the performance of bang-bang QAOA on MAX-2-SAT, finding the appearance of phase transitions with respect to the total time....

DNA-encoded small molecule libraries (DELs) have enabled discovery of novel inhibitors for many distinct protein targets of therapeutic value. We demonstrate a new approach applying machine learning to DEL selection data by identifying active molecules from large libraries of commercial and easily synthesizable compounds. We train models using only DEL selection data and apply automated or...

The quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) is a standard method for combinatorial optimization with a gate-based quantum computer. The QAOA consists of a particular ansatz for the quantum circuit architecture, together with a prescription for choosing the variational parameters of the circuit. We propose modifications to both. First, we define the Gibbs objective function and show...

We present IDEA (the Induction Dynamics gene Expression Atlas), a dataset constructed by independently inducing hundreds of transcription factors (TFs) and measuring timecourses of the resulting gene expression responses in budding yeast. Each experiment captures a regulatory cascade connecting a single induced regulator to the genes it causally regulates. We discuss the regulatory cascade of a...

We present a framework, which we call Molecule Deep Q-Networks (MolDQN), for molecule optimization by combining domain knowledge of chemistry and state-of-the-art reinforcement learning techniques (double Q-learning and randomized value functions). We directly define modifications on molecules, thereby ensuring 100% chemical validity. Further, we operate without pre-training on any dataset to...

The numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs) is challenging because of the need to resolve spatiotemporal features over wide length- and timescales. Often, it is computationally intractable to resolve the finest features in the solution. The only recourse is to use approximate coarse-grained representations, which aim to accurately represent long-wavelength dynamics while...

The etiological underpinnings of many CNS disorders are not well understood. This is likely due to the fact that individual diseases aggregate numerous pathological subtypes, each associated with a complex landscape of genetic risk factors. To overcome these challenges, researchers are integrating novel data types from numerous patients, including imaging studies capturing broadly applicable...

As scientists from myriad fields rush to perform algorithmic analyses, Google's Patrick Riley calls for clear standards in research and reporting.

While additive manufacturing (AM) has facilitated the production of complex structures, it has also highlighted the immense challenge inherent in identifying the optimum AM structure for a given application. Numerical methods are important tools for optimization, but experiment remains the gold standard for studying nonlinear, but critical, mechanical properties such as toughness. To address...

Deep neural networks have achieved state of the art accuracy at classifying molecules with respect to whether they bind to specific protein targets. A key breakthrough would occur if these models could reveal the fragment pharmacophores that are causally involved in binding. Extracting chemical details of binding from the networks could potentially lead to scientific discoveries about the...

Understanding the relationship between amino acid sequence and protein function is a long-standing problem in molecular biology with far-reaching scientific implications. Despite six decades of progress, state-of-the-art techniques cannot annotate $\sim1/3$ of microbial protein sequences, hampering our ability to exploit sequences collected from diverse organisms. To address this, we report a...

Supervised learning on molecules has incredible potential to be useful in chemistry, drug discovery, and materials science. Luckily, several promising and closely related neural network models invariant to molecular symmetries have already been described in the literature. These models learn a message passing algorithm and aggregation function to compute a function of their entire input graph....

Image-based screening is a powerful technique to reveal how chemical, genetic, and environmental perturbations affect cellular state. Its potential is restricted by the current analysis algorithms that target a small number of cellular phenotypes and rely on expert-engineered image features. Newer algorithms that learn how to represent an image are limited by the small amount of labeled data...

Ammonia (NH3) production is an industrial process that consumes between 1-2% of global energy annually and is responsible for 2-3% of greenhouse gas emissions. Ammonia is primarily used for agricultural fertilizers, but it also conforms to the US DOE targets for hydrogen storage materials. Modern industrial facilities use the century-old Haber-Bosch process, whose energy usage and carbon...

Background: Large image datasets acquired on automated microscopes typically have some fraction of low quality, out-of-focus images, despite the use of hardware autofocus systems. Identification of these images using automated image analysis with high accuracy is important for obtaining a clean, unbiased image dataset. Complicating this task is the fact that image focus quality is only well-...

Many fields of basic and applied science require efficiently exploring complex systems with high dimensionality. An example of such a challenge is optimising the performance of plasma fusion experiments. The highly-nonlinear and temporally-varying interaction between the plasma, its environment and external controls presents a considerable complexity in these experiments. A further difficulty...

We investigate the impact of choosing regressors and molecular representations for the construction of fast machine learning (ML) models of thirteen electronic ground-state properties of organic molecules. The performance of each regressor/representation/property combination is assessed with learning curves which report approximation errors as a function of training set size. Molecular...

We introduce tensor field neural networks, which are locally equivariant to 3D rotations, translations, and permutations of points at every layer. 3D rotation equivariance removes the need for data augmentation to identify features in arbitrary orientations. Our network uses filters built from spherical harmonics; due to the mathematical consequences of this filter choice, each layer accepts as...

In photovoltaic (PV) materials development, the complex relationship between device performance and underlying materials parameters obfuscates experimental feedback from current-voltage (J-V) characteristics alone. Here, we address this complexity by adding temperature and injection dependence and applying a Bayesian inference approach to extract multiple device-relevant materials parameters...

Importance: Deep learning is a family of computational methods that allow an algorithm to program itself by learning from a large set of examples that demonstrate the desired behavior, removing the need to specify rules explicitly. Application of these methods to medical imaging requires further assessment and validation. Objective: To apply deep learning to create an algorithm for automated...

Molecular “fingerprints” encoding structural information are the workhorse of cheminformatics and machine learning in drug discovery applications. However, fingerprint representations necessarily emphasize particular aspects of the molecular structure while ignoring others, rather than allowing the model to make data-driven decisions. We describe molecular graph convolutions, a machine learning...

Massively multitask neural architectures provide a learning framework for drug discovery that synthesizes information from many distinct biological sources. To train these architectures at scale, we gather large amounts of data from public sources to create a dataset of nearly 40 million measurements across more than 200 biological targets. We investigate several aspects of the multitask...

Profiling cellular phenotypes from microscopic imaging can provide meaningful biological information resulting from various factors affecting the cells. One motivating application is drug development: morphological cell features can be captured from images, from which similarities between different drug compounds applied at different doses can be quantified. The general approach is to find a...

We discuss how “mix effects” can surprise users of visualizations and potentially lead them to incorrect conclusions. This statistical issue (also known as “omitted variable bias” or, in extreme cases, as “Simpson’s paradox”) is widespread and can affect any visualization in which the quantity of interest is an aggregated value such as a weighted sum or average. Our first contribution is to...

Imaging is a central method in life sciences, and the drive to extract information from microscopy approaches has led to methods to fluorescently label specific cellular constituents. However, the specificity of fluorescent labels varies, labeling can confound biological measurements, and spectral overlap limits the number of labels to a few that can be resolved simultaneously. Here, we...