Machine learning expert Prof Chris Bishop

The prestigious Royal Institution Christmas Lectures have been inspiring young engineers since Michael Faraday began them in 1825. Over the years, millions of excitable children have sat alongside equally excited adults as the likes of David Attenborough and George Porter have attempted to explain the world through magnificent experiments in chemistry, physics and biology.

One of those bright-eyed children was Christopher Bishop, now a partner at Microsoft Research in Cambridge and a leading expert in machine learning. ’I loved those lectures,’ said Bishop. ’I watched them every year and just found them incredibly inspiring. It’s probably one of the factors that has got me to where I am now.’

Today, Bishop is vice-president of the Royal Institution, chair of computer science at Edinburgh University and head of the Machine Learning and Perception group at Microsoft Research. In May, he was awarded the Rooke Medal for public engagement in engineering and science and is at present the only person in Europe to hold the title of ’distinguished scientist’ at Microsoft.

At an early age, Bishop knew he wanted to be involved in scientific research. At school he built his own CO2 laser and was nicknamed ’professor’ by his fellow students. At university, while others were whiling away their summer, he was working part-time at the Culham Laboratory on the Joint European Torus (JET) nuclear fusion programme- a job that sparked his interest in machine learning and where he stayed for the next eight years.

’While I was there, we had something of a revolution going on in the field of machine intelligence,’ said Bishop. ’That area has always fascinated me. When I was a youngster, around the time of the moon landings, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey really grabbed my attention. In the film, there was a computer that you could have a conversation with. It could reason, it could philosophise, it could beat you at chess, all sorts of things.’

This fascination with artificial intelligence (AI) came to a temporary halt during his university years when the AI field opted for a rule-based approach. ’It just didn’t interest me,’ said Bishop. ’The approach was based on what we call “expert systems” and getting rules from humans. But the whole thing was very brittle and failed in almost all situations. Fundamentally, the world can’t be described by simple rules. It wasn’t, in my opinion, the way to go about it.’

Instead, Bishop was interested in the links between neural networks and statistics. He believed that computers should be programmed to learn from experience rather than taught rules much like humans are. This way of thinking gradually caught on and in the late 1980s researchers were attempting to put the theory into practice. Bishop himself began applying these techniques to analyse data on fusion experiments at Culham, and in 1995 he published a book entitled Neural Networks and Pattern Recognition.

His efforts in the field paid off and when Microsoft Research decided to set up an office in Cambridge, he was one of the first people it went to. ’The whole of Microsoft Research came to see me in a taxi. All three of them,’ laughed Bishop. ’It was a great opportunity, but I was keen to go back to Edinburgh University where I had done my PhD. So we agreed that I would do that part-time, which has worked out great in terms of strengthening our relationships with the academic world.’

“With TrueSkill, you can estimate the player’s ability accurately after five games, giving them a good gaming experience right from the start”

Today, Microsoft Research has more than 100 researchers in Cambridge working on a number of research areas, including computer-mediated living, constraint reasoning and computational science. With the might of the multinational corporation behind them, Bishop’s research group in Machine Learning and Perception has already had commercial success by developing the TrueSkill ranking system for the Xbox Live. The system allows the Xbox to estimate the skill of players very early on in their gaming, and match them to other players of the same ability.

’With TrueSkill, you can estimate the player’s ability accurately after five games using our Bayesian approach, rather than the 50 games under the old system,’ said Bishop. ’This is important because it means that players are getting a good gaming experience right from the start, rather than having to play for a long time and constantly getting beaten.’

Bishop’s enthusiasm for his research has been clear throughout his career. But the moment he is most proud of is when he was given the opportunity to share his passion for science and engineering by presenting the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 2008. ’It meant a lot to me personally,’ he said. ’I felt I owed so much to the Royal Institution, because it was thanks to them that I understood how exciting science is, and it was my chance to inspire the younger generation as I had been all those years ago… It’s something I love doing. If I didn’t need to work for a living, I’d probably do the same thing. It’s hard to imagine a better life.’