page_title: Demis Hassabis
section_title: University College London and neuroscience
hierarchical_section_title: Demis Hassabis / Career after graduation / University College London and neuroscience
caption_attribution_description: The next big frontier is the mind and brain "When we were kids, we felt like the space age was imminent," says Google machine learning expert Blaise Aguera y Arcas. "But in a funny way, the big frontier for our generation is the mind, the brain -- these inward spaces." The engineer, who was the architect of Bing Maps, was joined on stage at WIRED2014 by DeepMind Technologies founder Demis Hassabis and Ben Medlock, CTO of Swiftkey. The trio have a great deal in common: a love of chess, a love of space invaders and a drive to create the next artificial intelligence revolution. For Medlock, it's about predicting natural language to make typing easier and machines preemptive and smarter, while Hassabis -- whose London-based company was acquired by Google this year -- is working to one day integrate machine learning in everything, to tackle big world problems like climate change and the flagging healthcare system. For now, his technology is being trialled and tested on Space Invaders. And it's pretty darn good. "The computer loses three lives almost immediately," says Hassabis, indicating to a video of his machine playing Space Invaders for the first time ever. "Now, this is it after overnight training on our servers -- it's now better at playing the game than any human. It has perfectly modelled this complex stream." The system even taught the DeepMind team a thing or two after training on Pong for 240 minutes -- it developed a perfect system of engineering a tunnel to beat the game every time. DeepMind's applications are in ecommerce and games for now, but as with Swiftkey, the horizon is looking broad. Both Medlock and Hassabis were compelled by the idea of the intelligent machine as children and "that sense of wanting to explore the unknown," as Medlock puts it. They are engineers, and by nature problem solvers -- creating a truly intelligent machine is the ultimate problem left wide open to tackle. The solution, as all three see it, is to "integrate all of these sources of [big data] into one unified system" as Medlock explains. We're still a long way off from basing machine intelligence on human reality. Hassabis points out that Deep Blue, the IBM computer that can beat the world's best human chess players, and was at one point seen as the pinnacle of machine intelligence, would be stumped if it had to play a game of noughts and crosses. "You could trivially teach that to a person in a few minutes -- but Deep Blue, you'd have to totally reprogram it. All that chess knowledge would be useless." "We're interested in the self-learning type of AI that can learn how to master tasks directly from experiences." www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-10/16/google-zeitgeist @ Wired 2014 Conference in London
context_page_description: Demis Hassabis CBE FRS FREng FRSA is a British artificial intelligence researcher, neuroscientist, video game designer, entrepreneur, and five times winner of the Pentamind board games championship. He is the CEO and co-founder of DeepMind.
context_section_description: Following Elixir Studios, Hassabis returned to academia to obtain his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London (UCL) in 2009 supervised by Eleanor Maguire. He sought to find inspiration in the human brain for new AI algorithms.
  He continued his neuroscience and artificial intelligence research as a visiting scientist jointly at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), under Tomaso Poggio, and Harvard University, before earning a Henry Wellcome postdoctoral research fellowship to the Gatsby Charitable Foundation Computational Neuroscience Unit, UCL in 2009.
  Working in the field of autobiographical memory and amnesia, he co-authored several influential papers published in Nature, Science, Neuron and PNAS. One of his most highly cited papers, published in PNAS, showed systematically for the first time that patients with damage to their hippocampus, known to cause amnesia, were also unable to imagine themselves in new experiences. The finding established a link between the constructive process of imagination and the reconstructive process of episodic memory recall. Based on this work and a follow-up Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, Hassabis developed a new theoretical account of the episodic memory system identifying scene construction, the generation and online maintenance of a complex and coherent scene, as a key process underlying both memory recall and imagination. This work received widespread coverage in the mainstream media and was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year in any field by the journal Science.
caption: Demis Hassabis (left) with Blaise Agüera y Arcas (right) in 2014, at the Wired conference in London
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