Royal Society Research Grant awarded!

I have been awarded a 20,000£ research grant from the Royal Society. This grant has a duration of 12 months, and the funds will be used to buy consumables and equipment. The problem that I will be develop has as title “ZombieML: Reanimating inanimate objects with machine learning”. And here you can read a brief description of the work to do:

Zombies are mythological undead creatures found in horror stories. These stories usually involve a dead animal getting infected with a virus or similar sci-fi mechanism, and coming back to “life” through reanimation. There is some debate in the community about zombies being alive or dead, and in this research we will consider that they lie somewhere in between. Interestingly, a similar process happened four billions years ago, when inanimate matter became alive. Scientists call these theoretical first living entities “protocells”. But were they really alive? What about “proto-protocells”? While today the distinction being “alive” and “dead” is a binary step, was it the same during the origin of life? To answer this, we will use Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), a technique used to describe or model datasets, and to generate novel data by sampling from them.