5 Minutes with Prof. Simon Lucas

IEEE CIS Student Activities Subcommittee invites you to get to know the pioneers and experts in the Computational Intelligence. This month "5 minutes with..." focuses on Prof. Simon Lucas. What is your title, full name, and place of work? Simon Lucas, Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Head of School Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London. What grade of member in CIS are you? Senior Member. How long have you been a member of CIS? 20 years – I joined in WCCI 1998 in Anchorage, Alaska. One reason why you are a member of CIS: Great network of members. What was your service pathway in the Computational Intelligence Society? Games Technical Committee chair, AdCom member, program chair of various conferences (co-founded IEEE Conference on Games), founding EiC of IEEE Transactions on Games, VP Education. Can you share with us one success story that will motivate young members and provide useful guidelines for their careers? There are many ways to be successful: you have to find what works for you, and embrace new opportunities as they arise if they interest you. Life is a classic bandit optimisation problem of doing what you already like versus exploring new areas. A significant point for me was discovering the wonderfully open-ended challenge of Game AI and using it as a path to more general intelligence, as well as using games as a great application area. For me the magic of computational intelligence is the way that smart behaviour emerges from simple low-level statistical processes, and I observe this every day when developing Game AI agents. Also, one of the most satisfying things has been working with excellent PhD students and colleagues. What is your typical working day? Meeting, meeting, meeting, write some cool AI code. What is your ideal weekend? 5k run plus time with family. What are you reading, watching or listening to at the moment: Writing and testing a great new variation of “Planet Wars”. Favorite place: London! Person you would most like to meet- past or present, real or fictional: Ricky Gervais, best comedian in the world. What items would you take on a desert island and why: My laptop (plus an everlasting battery!) – I love writing AI code – currently working on a new class of bandit-based evolutionary algorithms that have excellent sample-efficiency and can be applied to a range of problems in Game Design and Game AI. Give one interesting fact about yourself: As a budding thespian I had good reviews from the local press.