Country for PR: United Kingdom
Contributor: PR Newswire Europe
Monday, April 12 2021 - 17:00
AsiaNet
Cambridge Quantum Appoints Professor Stephen Clark as Head of Artificial Intelligence
CAMBRIDGE, England, Apr. 12, 2021 /PRNewswire-AsiaNet/ --

Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC)[ http://www.cambridgequantum.com/ ] are 
pleased to announce the appointment of Prof. Stephen Clark as Head of 
Artificial Intelligence. Prof. Clark joins CQC from DeepMind where he was a 
Senior Staff Research Scientist and led a team working on grounded language 
learning in virtual environments. He also holds an Honorary Professorship at 
Queen Mary University of London.

Prior to DeepMind, Prof. Clark spent 10 years as a member of faculty at the 
University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology, where he 
was Reader in Natural Language Processing. Before that, Prof. Clark was a 
member of faculty at the Oxford University Department of Computer Science, and 
a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and 
Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sussex, and a Bachelor of Arts 
in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge (Gonville and Caius College).

Ilyas Khan, CEO of CQC, said, "I am thrilled to welcome Prof. Clark to 
Cambridge Quantum as a senior member of our amazing scientific team. Steve is a 
world class scientist of the absolute highest standing, and I am excited at the 
perspective and leadership he brings at this vital time of our development. As 
Head of Artificial Intelligence, Steve will advance our mission of making the 
most of quantum computing hardware in these early stages of their development, 
as we create applications that will affect humanity as a whole when quantum 
computers scale and approach fault tolerance."

Prof. Clark said, "I am delighted to be joining Cambridge Quantum, a 
cutting-edge world-leading quantum computing company. I am especially pleased 
to be reigniting my long-standing collaboration with Prof. Bob Coecke, now 
Chief Scientist at Cambridge Quantum, and excited about exploring the potential 
of quantum computers in AI generally with the company's impressive scientific 
teams. I am also very excited that I will be continuing, indeed accelerating a 
research program in language processing that started 15 years ago when I 
presented at OASIS (The Oxford Advanced Seminar on Informatic Structures), 
setting out the problem of composing distributed representations in language, 
which seems especially well-suited to a solution based on quantum computation." 

Prof. Clark's most recent papers

- Formalising Concepts as Grounded Abstractions, Stephen Clark, Alexander 
Lerchner, Tamara von Glehn, Olivier Tieleman, Richard Tanburn, Misha 
Dashevskiy, Matko Bosnjak, arXiv Jan 2021 [PDF] [ 
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.05125.pdf ]
- Grounded Language Learning Fast and Slow, Felix Hill, Olivier Tieleman, 
Tamara von Glehn, Nathaniel Wong, Hamza Merzic, Stephen Clark, ICLR 2021 [PDF] 
[ https://openreview.net/pdf?id=wpSWuz_hyqA ]
- Imitating Interactive Intelligence, The DeepMind Interactive Agents Group, 
arXiv Dec 2020 [PDF] [ https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.05672.pdf ]

A full list of publications can be found here:

https://sites.google.com/site/stephenclark609/publications
Prof. Clark's recent talks

Grounded Language Learning in Virtual Environments 
- Cambridge University, February 2020 [link] [ 
http://cumin.org.uk/2020/02/21/deepmind-talk-grounded-language-learning-in-virtual-environments/ 
]
- EECS Distinguished Lecture at Queen Mary University of London, March 2020 
[link] [ 
http://eecs.qmul.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/items/eecs-distinguished-lecture-seminar-stephen-clark---grounded-language-learning-.html 
]
- Keynote at the Probability and Meaning Conference, University of Gothenburg 
(virtual), October 2020 [link] [ 
https://sites.google.com/view/pam2020/program/invited-talk-abstracts ] 
- Cognitive Informatics Seminar, University of Quebec (virtual), November 2020 
[video] [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI9yqQWcPGA&feature=youtu.be ]
 

About Cambridge Quantum Computing

Founded in 2014 and backed by some of the world's leading quantum computing 
companies, CQC is a global leader in quantum software and quantum algorithms, 
enabling clients to achieve the most out of rapidly evolving quantum computing 
hardware. CQC has offices in the UK, USA and Japan. 

For more information, visit: CQC at http://www.cambridgequantum.com and on 
LinkedIn [ https://www.linkedin.com/company/cambridge-quantum-computing-limited 
]. Access the tket Python module on GitHub. [ 
https://cqcl.github.io/pytket/build/html/index.html ] 

Source: Cambridge Quantum Computing