Cambridge Quantum Computing Appoints Professor Stephen Clark as Head of Artificial Intelligence

(PRNewswire) Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC) 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).
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]
• Grounded Language Learning Fast and Slow, Felix Hill, Olivier Tieleman, Tamara von Glehn, Nathaniel Wong, Hamza Merzic, Stephen Clark, ICLR 2021 [PDF]
• Imitating Interactive Intelligence, The DeepMind Interactive Agents Group, arXiv Dec 2020 [PDF]