Interview: Artificial Intelligence: Technology at Work Mendeley Careers

What inspired you to study Artificial Intelligence? I did my first degree at Imperial College in computer science; in my final year, I took a module in Logic Programming which was taught by Professor Robert Kowalski. It was fascinating because it was so different to other things I'd learned; it featured a declarative form of programming that allowed the system to "reason" and provide its own conclusions. Indeed, this was so fascinating for me that I wrote a connection graph theorem prover in Prolog for my final year project; I then went on to study Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. I remain fascinated by systems that permit you to say things at a high level of abstraction and then allow systems to draw their own conclusions. What were your initial main challenges when you began to study Artificial Intelligence?