Cambridge Quantum Appoints Professor Stephen Clark as Head of Artificial Intelligence

CAMBRIDGE, England, April 12, 2021 /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).

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]
• 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]

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]
• EECS Distinguished Lecture at Queen Mary University of London, March 2020 [link]
• Keynote at the Probability and Meaning Conference, University of Gothenburg (virtual), October 2020 [link]
• Cognitive Informatics Seminar, University of Quebec (virtual), November 2020 [video]

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. Access the tket Python module on GitHub.