Folded Narratives: AI, Protein Prediction, and Scientific Silos

Iman Mossavat speaks with Professor Daniel Cremers, Director of the Munich Center for Machine Learning, Professor at the Technical University of Munich, and one of Germany's most distinguished AI researchers. Cremers is a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize and the 2024 ECCV Koenderink Test of Time Award.They discuss the groundbreaking work his team carried out in protein structure prediction back in 2016, years before AlphaFold made headlines. Although this work was presented at NeurIPS 2016, the flagship machine learning conference, in front of thousands of researchers, it was largely overlooked in subsequent citations.Beyond the science, Cremers reflects on the tension between academia and Big Tech, the challenges of recognition in a fast-moving field, and what it means to pursue meaningful work in AI today.