Mr ZHANG Zeqi, PhD student from the Department of Applied Biology and Chemical Technology at PolyU, won a gold medal in the international Kaggle’s AI competition held in November 2023. Mr ZHANG was supervised by Prof. MA Cong, Associate Professor from the same department.

Mr ZHANG's research, "Predicting Gene Expression Perturbations by Small Molecules Across Cell Types Using Deep Learning", centres on AI-based drug discovery. In the competition, he developed a deep learning-based approach that integrated various feature extraction techniques, including molecular fingerprints, molecular descriptors and structural information, to predict the effects of small molecule perturbations on gene expression across different cell types. The competition was highly competitive, drawing more than 1,000 teams worldwide to join. Mr ZHANG’s solution was ranked ninth (within the top 1%) out of all the teams entering, finally garnering him a gold medal.

The competition is part of the Competition Track jointly organised by Kaggle, the world’s largest data science competition platform, and NeurIPS 2023, a top computational science conference. This competition focused on predicting the impact of small molecules on gene expression across diverse cell types. It tasked AI developers worldwide with devising innovative methods to forecast cellular responses to small molecule drug perturbations, a critical area with immense implications for drug discovery and fundamental biological research.