Background

Ethnicity: Hassabis was born to a Greek Cypriot father and a Chinese Singaporean mother.

Demis Hassabis was born on July 27, 1976, in London. He grew up in North London. He was a child prodigy in chess.

Education

Hassabis was educated at Christ's College, Finchley, a state-funded comprehensive school in East Finchley, North London. He completed his GCE Advanced Level and Scholarship Level exams early at the age of 15 and 16.

A child prodigy in chess, Hassabis reached master standard at the age of 13 with an Elo rating of 2300 and captained many of the England junior chess teams. He represented the University of Cambridge in the Oxford-Cambridge varsity chess matches of 1995, 1996 and 1997 winning a half blue.

Hassabis left Bullfrog to study Computer Science Tripos at Cambridge University, which in 1953 had the world's first undergraduate computer science course. He graduated from Queens' College Cambridge with a double first-class honours degree in 1997.

During the course of a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London (UCL), Hassabis published several influential papers concerning memory and amnesia. Hassabis received his PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London in 2009.

Career

Demis began a career in video games at British studio Bullfrog Productions, co-designing and lead programming on the classic game Theme Park at 17 years old, alongside the legendary games designer Peter Molyneux.

Released in 1994, Theme Park sold several million copies and won a Golden Joystick award. The game set players the task of building a successful theme park in the UK with just a few thousand pounds and a small plot of land. (Strategies for success in the game included putting more salt in crisps so people would buy more drinks, making queues long but fast-moving and obscuring the destination, hiring a cleaner to clean the toilets, and placing the exit of one roller-coaster close to the entrance of the next to minimise walking distance between attractions).

Hassabis rejoined Molyneux, who had now set up another games developer called Lionhead Studios, a breakaway from developer Bullfrog. Hassabis briefly worked as a lead AI programmer on the title Black & White, a game that allowed gamers to play the role of a god ruling over an island populated by various tribes.

In 1998, Hassabis left Lionhead Studios to found his own London-based independent games developer, Elixir Studios. The company grew to 60 people strong and signed deals with large publishers Vivendi Universal and Microsoft. His games included Republic: The Revolution and Evil Genius. The intellectual property and technology rights from Elixir Studios were sold to various games publishers and the studio was closed in April 2005.

In 1999, aged 23, he won the Mind Sports Olympiad – an annual international multi-disciplined competition for games of mental skill. He won it a record five times before retiring from competitive play in 2003.

Hassabis then changed tack, switching from games development to a career in cognitive neuroscience, to allow him to return to his primary interest in artificial intelligence. Hassabis published several influential papers concerning memory and amnesia. His work was listed as in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of 2007 by Science magazine. Hassabis established a new theory around the way the mind creates and maintains the context of remembered events as a key process underlying both the recall of memories and imagination. Some of Hassabis's findings were subsequently disputed by experts in the field; the debate is still ongoing.

Demis continued his neuroscience and AI research at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL as a Wellcome Trust research fellow. He was also a visiting researcher jointly at MIT and Harvard.

In 2011 he left academia to co-found a London-based artificial intelligence startup, DeepMind Technologies, with Shane Legg, whom he met at UCL, and Mustafa Suleyman. Among other things, the company developed a computer system capable of understanding and playing an Atari computer game simply by looking at it on a screen as a human would.

On 27 January, DeepMind was acquired by Google for £400m – the company's largest European acquisition – in order to add technology and talent to Google's core business of search. Google uses AI to understand search queries providing context awareness and allowing users to talk to the computer as they would a human, whether by voice or using a keyboard.

Achievements

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  Demis Hassabis is the Founder and CEO of DeepMind, a neuroscience-inspired AI company which develops general-purpose learning algorithms and uses them to tackle some of the world’s most pressing challenges. In 2014, DeepMind was acquired by Google in their biggest ever European acquisition. The man behind Google's new £400m acquisition is a former child prodigy who was a chess master and a games developer before moving into artificial intelligence.
  
  He is a five-time World Games Champion, recipient of the Royal Society’s Mullard Award, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Academy of Engineering, winning the Academy's Silver Medal. In 2017 he featured in the Time 100 list of most influential people, and in 2018 he was awarded a CBE for services to science and technology.

Works

More photos

• movie

  • AlphaGo 2017

• Video game

  • Republic: The Revolution 2003
  • Theme Park Inc. 1994

Views

Quotations: "The ultimate aim is to use these general-purpose technologies and apply them to all sorts of important real world problems."

"However, the more significant aspect of all this for us is that Alpha Go isn’t just an expert system built with handcrafted rules like, for example, DeepBlue was, but instead it uses general machine learning techniques to figure out for itself how to win at Go, the ultimate challenge, though, which still lies ahead, is to beat one of the best players in the world."

"While games are the perfect platform for developing and testing AI algorithms quickly and efficiently, ultimately we want to apply these techniques to important real world problems, because the methods we’ve used are general purpose, our hope is that one day they could be extended to help us address some of society’s toughest and most pressing problems – from medical diagnostics, to climate modeling to smart phone assistance. We’re excited to see what we can use this technology to tackle next.

Membership

Hassabis was later elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2009 for his influential game-design work and contribution to the games industry.

He is also a Fellow Benefactor at Queens' College, Cambridge, Honorary Fellow at the University College London, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (2017) and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) (May 2018)

• 

  Royal Society of Arts

  2009

• 

  Royal Academy of Engineering

  2017

• 

  Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)

  May, 2018

Personality

Demis Hassabis has a modest demeanour and an unassuming countenance.

He generally sleeps at about 4am in the morning.

Physical Characteristics: His eyes and hair are brown.

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  At the ages of 13 Hassabis reached the rank of chess master, and was the second-highest-rated player in the world under 14 at the time – beaten only by the Hungarian chess grandmaster and strongest female chess player in history, Judit Polgár.

Connections

Nothing is known about his personal life.

Doctoral advisor:

Eleanor Maguire

(born 27 March 1970)

She is an Irish neuroscientist and academic.

References

• Time Magazine (May 1, 2017/May 8, 2017) The 100 Most Influential People Riz Ahmed Cover