The winners of this year's Future Science Prize were announced during a press conference jointly held in Hong Kong and Beijing on Wednesday.

Jijie Chai and Jian-Min Zhou took the life sciences prize for researching resistosomes, while Zhongxian Zhao and Xianhui Chen were awarded the physical sciences prize for discovering high-temperature superconducting materials.

Kaiming He, Jian Sun, Shaoqing Ren, and Xiangyu Zhang won the prize in maths and computer science for their work on deep residual learning in AI.

The Future Science Prize is a privately funded science prize jointly established by scientists and entrepreneurs, with each prize carrying a monetary award of US$1 million.

Hong Kong's technology chief Sun Dong congratulated the scientists, saying the Future Science Prize is the "Nobel Prize of China".

Sun said that he is delighted that both the award ceremony and award week will be held in Hong Kong this year, for the first time.

"At that time, nearly 100 famous scientists from many countries around the world will gather to bring the highest-end scientific research information and a forward-looking vision, promote the exchange of international scientific research talents, and deepen the international community's recognition of China's scientific development achievements," he said.

The ceremony will take place on October 17 at the Hong Kong Palace Museum, while the award week will run over four days, from October 14 to 17, with science events taking place across the city.