MURRAY SHANAHAN is professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London and a senior research scientist at DeepMind. He graduated from Imperial with a First in computer science in 1984, and obtained his PhD in computer science from Cambridge University (King's College) in 1988. Since then he has carried out work in artificial intelligence, robotics, and cogitive science. He was a postdoc in the Department of Computing at Imperial College from 1987 to 1991, an EPSRC advanced research fellow in the same department from 1991 to 1995, and a senior research fellow in the Computer Science Department at Queen Mary & Westfield College (London) from 1995 to 1998. In 2017 he joined DeepMind, retaining his professorship at Imperial College on a part-time basis.
His publications span artificial intelligence, robotics, logic, dynamical systems, computational neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. His work up to 2000 was in the tradition of classical, symbolic AI. He then turned his attention to the brain and its embodiment. His current interests include neurodynamics, consciousness, machine learning, and the impacts of artificial intelligence. His book Embodiment and the Inner Life (Oxford University Press, 2010) was a significant influence on the film Ex Machina for which he was a scientific advisor. His book The Technological Singularity was published by MIT Press in 2015.
