Latest news with #SchmidtSciences
Forbes
03-04-2025
- Science
- Forbes
The 2025 Cohort Of Schmidt Science Fellows Is Announced
Wendy Schmidt, President of the Schmidt Family Foundation and co-founder with her husband, Eric ... More Schmidt, of Schmidt Sciences. (AP Photo/Matt Dunham, Pool) The 2025 cohort of Schmidt Science Fellows has been announced. As in years past, this year's class of 32 fellows are all recent PhD's who've been identified as some of the most outstanding early-career scientists in the world. The Schmidt Science Fellows program is supported by Schmidt Sciences, co-founded in 2024 by former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, President of the Schmidt Family Foundation. The current class is the eighth cohort in the program, which is delivered in a partnership with the Rhodes Trust. The fellows will join a total of 209 previous Schmidt Science Fellows who've come from nearly 40 countries over the duration of the program. Considered one of the most prestigious scientific postdoctoral awards in the world, Schmidt Science Fellows are awarded support for either one or two years in a field of study that represents a pivot from their Ph.D concentration. An emphasis is placed on encouraging interdisciplinary research with the potential to address some of the world's most pressing challenges. Fellows are given a stipend of $110,000 a year to support their personal and living costs during their fellowships. In addition to their stipend, the fellows receive individualized mentoring and participate in a year-long Science Leadership Program that helps them cultivate the skills, experience and networks expected from interdisciplinary science leaders. 'Philanthropic funding of scientific research, and especially support of early-career researchers, has never been more important,' said Wendy Schmidt, in a press release. 'By providing Schmidt Science Fellows with support, community, and freedom to work across disciplines and gain new insights, we hope they'll tackle some of the world's most vexing challenges, achieve breakthroughs and help create a healthier, more resilient world for all," she added. Each year, the Schmidt Science Fellows program works with about 100 of the world's leading science and engineering institutions to identify the most promising candidates for the fellowships. Nominated candidates are selected through a process that includes an academic review by leaders in their home disciplines and final interviews with panels of experts, including senior representatives from many scientific disciplines and different business sectors. This year the fellows were nominated by 27 different universities, including, for the first time, McGill University in Canada, RWTH Aachen University in Germany, Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, the University of California, Los Angeles in the US, and University of Groningen in the Netherlands. The full list of the 2025 Schmidt Science Fellows can be found here. Their areas of study span a wide range of topics in biology, neurosciences, engineering, cancer diagnosis and treatment, artificial intelligence, biomaterials, and sustainability. As examples: According to its website, Schmidt Sciences 'is a philanthropic organization that accelerates scientific knowledge and breakthroughs to support a thriving world.' It prioritizes research in five areas: AI and Advanced Computing, Astrophysics and Space, Biosciences, Climate and Science Systems. Stu Feldman, Chief Scientist at Schmidt Sciences, described the fellows as 'a dynamic global community of remarkable scientists and champions of interdisciplinary research.' He said their work "exemplifies Schmidt Sciences' commitment to support pioneering approaches that will drive the next era of discovery and innovation.'
New York Times
26-03-2025
- Science
- New York Times
New A.I. Project Explores Mysteries of Delacroix, Master of Romanticism
Barthélémy Jobert is so engrossed in the 19th century that he takes an expansive view of it: For him it began intellectually in the 1760s and ran into the 1920s. A leading art historian in Paris and former president of what is now Sorbonne University, he is particularly expert in the work of Eugène Delacroix, the French Romantic artist best known for his 1830 painting 'Liberty Leading the People,' a stridently anti-royalist work depicting citizens rising up against a despot. Now, Jobert will be getting a significant boost in his ability to use artificial intelligence and other 21st-century technologies in his yearslong quest to explore Delacroix's art and resolve mysteries about its attribution. This week, Schmidt Sciences, a nonprofit founded by the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, plans to announce a new grantmaking program that will underwrite Jobert's project, known as Digital Delacroix, with funding thought to be in the high six figures. Jobert aims to digitize and analyze many things Delacroix — his letters and journals, the murals he painted in the second half of his career, even contemporary newspaper accounts of the man and his work — and cross-reference them for scholarly purposes while putting them online for others to explore. The grant from Schmidt will allow him to obtain more computing power and augment his current team of six by hiring a couple of researchers trained in both art history and A.I. — a rare breed, even in France. For Schmidt Sciences, Digital Delacroix is the first of a projected 10 to 15 grant recipients that will receive a total of $10 million to apply A.I. to research in the humanities. Outlays are expected to range from less than $100,000 to as much as $1.5 million. (Schmidt Sciences would not provide an exact figure for its support of Digital Delacroix.) Sorbonne University made a brief announcement of the organization's involvement in February, shortly after an international A.I. summit was held in Paris, but its role has not been detailed until now. For Jobert, it's the culmination of a passion he's had for almost 40 years, ever since he was a young teaching fellow at Harvard. He was standing in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts before Delacroix's 'The Lamentation,' an 1848 canvas that shows mourners surrounding the body of Christ after the crucifixion, when he was struck by a figure in the foreground: John the Baptist, draped in the red cloak that often symbolizes his beheading. 'I cannot explain why,' Jobert said in a video interview, 'but for me, this red cloak is the image of soul.' At this point, Jobert has assembled an informal consortium of French institutions that includes units of the Ministry of Culture and the National Center for Scientific Research as well as a center for the humanities, a center for A.I. and other agencies at Sorbonne University. Work on digitizing the texts is well underway, so Jobert's attention is currently centered on the murals Delacroix painted for the grand buildings occupied by the French Parliament, in rooms that are almost never open to the public. His focus is on the National Assembly — the lower house of Parliament, which occupies the 18th-century Palais Bourbon. 'We have two projects,' he said. 'The first one is to make them accessible on a website' — to enable people to take a virtual tour of the legislature's library, the vast chamber where Delacroix labored for nine years, and to zoom in on anything they want. The second goal is to analyze these murals to settle questions of attribution: What did Delacroix paint himself, and what did he leave to his assistants? 'This is the part in which A.I. is playing the main role,' he said. It's also the part where Schmidt Sciences steps in. 'This question of multiple authorship is a really tricky one,' said Brent Seales, the American computer scientist who heads the organization's humanities-and-A.I. branch. Using A.I. to solve it is hard, he added, 'which is one of the reasons I love it.' Seales has encountered hard problems before. Years ago he and his team at the University of Kentucky invented a process that used A.I., among other technologies, to decipher the contents of carbonized papyrus scrolls excavated from the banks of the Dead Sea and from a Roman villa that was buried in the eruption that destroyed Pompeii. 'As philanthropists, we have the ability to take risks that government and businesses cannot or will not,' Wendy Schmidt said in an email. Bloomberg currently estimates the Schmidts' wealth at $32.5 billion. One reason the attribution effort is expected to be difficult is that it relies on analytical A.I., a branch of the field that's quite distinct from generative A.I., which set off the current frenzy with the release of tools like ChatGPT in 2022. Compared with the breakneck advances generative A.I. has made since, progress in analytical A.I. seems almost tortoise-like. To figure out who painted what, researchers under Jobert's direction have made up-close, high-resolution photographs of the murals and reconstructed the works in digital 3-D using photogrammetry. Technical data on Delacroix and other painters is being provided by a research unit within the Ministry of Culture. All of this will be fed into a computer vision system that will be trained to recognize Delacroix's brushstrokes and those of his studio assistants. 'We think there's a high possibility it will work,' said Xavier Fresquet, deputy director of the Sorbonne Center for Artificial Intelligence. Jobert wants to do the same with the murals in an even grander chamber in the 17th-century Palais du Luxembourg, home of the Senate. But his ultimate goal is far more ambitious than that: a virtual reconstruction, using generative A.I., of the allegorical murals by Delacroix that once adorned the Salon de la Paix in the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall of Paris. Their central element was 'Peace Descends to Earth,' a ceiling panel that depicted, in the words of the 19th-century writer and critic Théophile Gautier, 'the earth weeping, raising her eyes to heaven to plead for an end to her sorrows.' Earth's prayers would go unanswered, in life if not in art. In 1871, eight years after Delacroix's death, his murals went up in flames along with the rest of the building when the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune torched the place as they were being crushed by government forces. What remains in the archives is a single photograph, Delacroix's sketches, some etchings and two watercolors presented to Queen Victoria in 1855 by the Emperor Napoleon III. Nonetheless, Jobert is hopeful that he'll be able to come up with a reasonable facsimile of the Hôtel de Ville murals. 'We won't give you an exact reproduction of the room as it was. That's impossible,' he said. 'But we will give you what it could have been' — and would be still, if peace had indeed descended.
Washington Post
28-01-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Will China's open-source AI end U.S. supremacy in the field?
Eric Schmidt, former CEO and chairman of Google, is co-founder of Schmidt Sciences and chair of the nonpartisan think tank Special Competitive Studies Project. Dhaval Adjodah is co-founder and CEO of It has become almost a cliché to say that the AI landscape is changing fast. But in recent days, even those on the cutting edge of AI research were taken by surprise — by a Chinese company.
