religion birth_place nationality field work_institutions birth_date known_for prizes article_title name
atheist colchester , uk british computer science university college london kaist 16 may 1972 digital biology edge of computation prize nominee -lrb- 2005 -rrb- peter j. bentley
 peter j. bentley
peter j. bentley

dr peter john bentley -lrb- born 16 may 1972 -rrb- is a british author and computer scientist based at university college london .
peter j. bentley is an honorary reader and college fellow at ucl and a collaborating professor at kaist .
he is also a popular science author and consultant .
he is a contributing editor for wired uk and was the monthly host of the royal institution 's café scientifique .
born in colchester , england , he achieved a bsc in artificial intelligence from the university of essex -lrb- supervised by edward tsang -rrb- and a phd in evolutionary design -lrb- supervised by jonathan wakefield -rrb- at the age of 24 .
his doctorate thesis was entitled `` generic evolutionary design of solid objects using a genetic algorithm . ''
since 1997 he has performed research into evolutionary computation , artificial life , swarm intelligence , artificial immune systems , artificial neural networks and other types of biologically inspired computing , which he terms `` digital biology . ''
he is head of the digital biology interest group at the department of computer science , university college london .
he participates in science festivals and public events , such as the debate on complexity and evolution held at the natural history museum in july 2007 with richard dawkins , steve jones , lewis wolpert .
his research has been described in several articles of new scientist .
his recent research focuses on morphological computation and novel architectures designed for natural computation based on evolution , developmental and self-assembling systems .
he received extensive publicity for his iphone application istethoscope , which was developed in collaboration with cardiologists in usa .
the app has been used to gather heart sounds from people around the world in a research project to enable computers to diagnose heart disease automatically using machine learning .
most recently he cofounded the online marketplace kazoova ltd which specialises in quirky and unusual activities .
