Chemists are training machine learning algorithms used by Facebook and Google to find new molecules

For more than a decade, Facebook and Google algorithms have been learning as much as they can about you. It's how they refine their systems to deliver the news you read, those puppy videos you love, and the political ads you engage with. These same kinds of algorithms can be used to find billions of molecules and catalyze important chemical reactions that are currently induced with expensive and toxic metals, says Steven A. Lopez, an assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Northeastern. Lopez is working with a team of researchers to train machine learning algorithms to spot the molecular patterns that could help find new molecules in bulk, and fast. "We're teaching the machines to learn the chemistry knowledge that we have," Lopez says.