Kirsty Young's latest castaway is Queens' very own Demis Hassabis (1994), an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and co-founder and CEO of DeepMind.
As a child, Demis was a chess prodigy and, prior to attending university, at the age of 17 he took time out to work as a leading programmer on the iconic 1990s computer game: Theme Park.
Demis came up to Queens' in 1994, reading Computer Science. After graduating with a double first from Cambridge, he returned to his computer game roots and founded the company Elixir Studios.
In 2010, Demis founded an AI startup, DeepMind, based in London. DeepMind combined Demis's interests in neuroscience and machine learning. In 2014, Google purchased DeepMind and Demis has remained on as CEO. Google DeepMind continues to pioneer incredible research into the world of AI, most notably, AlphaGo, a program that lead to the stunning defeat of world Go champion, Lee Sedol, in 2016.
Listen now to Demis on Desert Island Discs.