London, England, United Kingdom
Scientific Advisor to FACT360 (awarded best "Mobile & Emerging Tech Start-up of 2022" for their e-Discovery, Insider Threat Detection & HR Analytics AI platform), J. Mark Bishop is an International Fellow of the Karel Čapek Center Praha and Professor of Cognitive Computing (Emeritus) at Goldsmiths, where he led a team that has developed AI & Analytics for Fraud Detection and B2B e-procurement; research (widely reported at the time) that was deployed by the UK National Audit Office in 2011 to identify £500m potential savings in the annual NHS consumable budget.
Over his career, Mark’s research has spanned the theory & practice of Artificial Intelligence. With an International track record as a consultant on AI & Data Ethics, he has been invited to advise on AI Policy at the UN (Geneva/Turin/Birmingham), the EC (Brussels) and the UK (Westminster/Whitehall). In addition, as an experienced speaker who enjoys discussing AI with both specialist & general audiences, Mark has been invited to present a number of international Plenary & Keynote addresses.
In 2010 Mark was elected to Chair the AISB, the UK Society for "Artificial Intelligence & Simulation of Behaviour", and the world’s oldest professional body for AI. Mark served a four-year term as Chair, during which he was co-opted to join the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC).
Having published 3 books, over 200+ articles and won £3m+ of research funding, Mark currently serves as Associate Editor of 9 Journals and is regularly asked to comment on AI, particularly in response to those who warn of its existential threat (e.g., Prof Hawking, Musk, Kurzweil et al., cf., New Scientist
FACT360 is a UK company pioneering the use of AI and unsupervised machine learning to help organisations find critical information that exists within their communication networks. Underpinned by leading edge academic research, its practical solutions generate results that are impossible to achieve in other ways. Formed in 2017, FACT360 is widely used in fraud and insider threat investigations and applies the technology more broadly providing businesses with fact-based rationale on which to take strategic decisions.
There are many state-of-art computer labs around the world already deploying AI on very complex academic problems; for example, strategic games (Google/DeepMind’s AlphaZero (Go, chess, shogi)), virtual assistants (Apple’s Siri), autonomous vehicles (Tesla Autopilot, Google Waymo, FiveAI), and natural language processing (IBM’s Watson). Significant progress in AI has been made through these advancements over the last few years. However, the game playing systems highlighted above, which with good cause have attracted the media spotlight, are built for well defined homogeneous and discretised environments, where the data at hand has a specific and unambiguous meaning. Commonly, business data environments are a far cry from these, having heterogeneous systems accessing siloed data stores with many textual fields that may be corrupt, misplaced, and sometimes missing. Commercial and legal constraints require ever greater needs for process transparency, data protection, and accountability. Businesses want high levels of process automation and interoperation at affordable costs and minimal risk. TCIDA brings together a multi-disciplinary group of world class specialists in artificial intelligence, data science and mathematics, with a unique and proven track record in deploying state-of-art computational tools (AI, [Deep] Neural Networks, Swarm Intelligence, Graphical Methods, NLP, Classification, Prediction) on real-world commercial, financial and business problems. Problems including: Procurement Analytics, HR Analytics, Process Automation, Data Quality and Provenance, Automation and AI Ethics. Mark is Associate Editor of nine international academic journals and - as the Director of TCIDA, the ex-Chair of the AISB, a co-opted expert on AI for ICRAC and Professor of Cognitive Computing at Goldsmiths - regularly asked to advise on policy relating to Artificial Intelligence at the UN, the EC and the UK.
Beginning way back in 2003, my research in Data Science (DTI and @UKplc) examined the possibility of fraud detection by detecting abnormal/unusual web/client activity. A follow-up project (DTI and @UKplc) with the University of Reading) led to the development of analytics software - SpendInsight (now commercialised by CloudBuy) - which was evaluated by the UK National Audit Office in the context of NHS annual procurement, where it famously highlighted potential savings of over £500million
Under the aegis of Cognitive Computing Professor J. Mark Bishop's research activity spans Artificial Intelligence (its theory & application) and Philosophy.
In the field of Artificial Intelligence Mark was foundationally involved in developing the first Swarm Intelligence algorithm, Stochastic Diffusion Search (SDS) - an efficient search, optimization & parameter estimation meta-heuristic. SDS is now established as one of the core Swarm Intelligence paradigms (c.f. the Swarm Intelligence Wikipedia pages:
After moving to Goldsmiths I developed a new MSc in Cognitive Computing. This entailed writing a new 40 credit module in Cognitive Science and its Critics and liaising with other staff to provide modules in Technology or thought and Java Programming. In my research, together with Dr. Nasuto (Reading), I published further work developing the theory of Stochastic Diffusion Processes; whilst in the philosophy of AI I also further refined the 'Dancing with Pixies' reductio against the possibility of computationally instantiated consciousness. Further work investigating Searle's Chinese room argument, also led me to dig deeper into Alan Turing's legacy which eventually led to involvement with Barry Cooper and the Alan Turing Centenary Committee. Soon after joining Goldsmiths I became a member of the AISB - the world's first society for Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour - and subsequently was nominated to join the organising committee of the society. As a Reader in Cognitive Computing at Goldsmiths I worked on funded research projects for: (a) the European Space Agency in mission planning; (b) the Knowledge Transfer Office and @UK plc in Online Fraud Detection and later Search Engine Technology - work which eventually morphed into the e-purchasing tools - SpendInsight and GreenInsight. AWARDS: At the 2006 Emerald Publishing Literati Network Awards for Excellence, a paper I co-authored with Dr. Slawek Nasuto, "Second Order Cybernetics and Enactive Perception", won the Norbert Wiener Award and was recognised as Outstanding Paper of 2006 by the journal Kybernetes.
Whilst at the university of Reading I was programme leader for Computer Science and Cybernetics; Cybernetics and Psychology and Intelligence Systems undergraduate degrees. In teaching I developed new undergraduate courses in: Introduction to Programming in Modula II; Introduction to Artificial Intelligence; Introduction to Cognitive Science; Neural Networks Applied; Further Cognitive Science; Computing Machinery & Intelligence; Advanced Neural Networks; Mind as Motion. I also developed new processes for undergraduate project allocation and assessment. In my research at the University of Reading - together with Dr. Slawek Nasuto and a strong team of graduate students - I carried out foundational work in Stochastic Diffusion Processes and Swarm Intelligence; pace Igor Aleksander, I also carried out new work in the field of Weightless Neural Networks. In contrast, in the area of the Philosophy of AI - together with John Preston (Dept. Philosophy, Reading) - I instigated an international critique of John Searle's 'Chinese Room Argument', one of the most controversial arguments in modern philosophy of mind. In the process I finessed a novel argument against the possibility of machine consciousness. Over the years this work has attracted media attention, not least because it attempts to undermine sensationalist claims that, 'robots will take over the world' and as a result I have been invited to debate the position several times: on TV as a panel guest on the BBC program 'Knowledge Talks'; twice on Radio Four - 'The Today Program' (live) and as one of the keynote speakers on a special New Year's Eve documentary on AI which also included contributions from Susan Blakemore, Jonathan Miller, Marvin Minsky, Kevin Warwick and Arthur C. Clarke - and most recently as a guest of BBC RADIO 3-Counties.