Ross Donald King is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

Machine Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

Chalmers University of Technology Chalmers University of Technology (, commonly referred to as Chalmers) is a private university, private research university located in Gothenburg, Sweden. Chalmers focuses on engineering and science, but more broadly it also conducts research ...

Education

King completed a

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree in

Microbiology Microbiology () is the branches of science, scientific study of microorganisms, those being of unicellular organism, unicellular (single-celled), multicellular organism, multicellular (consisting of complex cells), or non-cellular life, acellula ...

at the

University of Aberdeen The University of Aberdeen (abbreviated ''Aberd.'' in List of post-nominal letters (United Kingdom), post-nominals; ) is a public university, public research university in Aberdeen, Scotland. It was founded in 1495 when William Elphinstone, Bis ...

in 1983 and went on to study for a

Master of Science A Master of Science (; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., SM, S.M., ScM or Sc.M.) is a master's degree. In contrast to the Master of Arts degree, the Master of Science degree is typically granted for studies in sciences, engineering and medici ...

degree in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

at the University of Newcastle in 1985. Following this, he completed a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

The Turing Institute The Turing Institute was an artificial intelligence laboratory in Glasgow, Scotland, between 1983 and 1994. The company undertook basic and applied research, working directly with large companies across Europe, the United States and Japan devel ...

at the

University of Strathclyde The University of Strathclyde () is a public research university located in Glasgow, Scotland. Founded in 1796 as the Andersonian Institute, it is Glasgow's second-oldest university, having received its royal charter in 1964 as the first techn ...

in 1989 for work on developing machine learning methods for

protein structure prediction Protein structure prediction is the inference of the three-dimensional structure of a protein from its amino acid sequence—that is, the prediction of its Protein secondary structure, secondary and Protein tertiary structure, tertiary structure ...

Research

King's research interests are in the automation of science,

drug design Drug design, often referred to as rational drug design or simply rational design, is the invention, inventive process of finding new medications based on the knowledge of a biological target. The drug is most commonly an organic compound, organi ...

, AI,

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

and

synthetic biology Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a multidisciplinary field of science that focuses on living systems and organisms. It applies engineering principles to develop new biological parts, devices, and systems or to redesign existing systems found in nat ...

. He is probably best known for the

Robot Scientist Robot Scientist (also known as Adam) is a laboratory robot created and developed by a group of scientists including Ross King, Kenneth Whelan, Ffion Jones, Philip Reiser, Christopher Bryant, Stephen Muggleton, Douglas Kell, Emma Byrne and Steve ...

project which has created a robot that can: * hypothesize to explain observations * devise experiments to test these hypotheses * physically run the experiments using

laboratory robotics Laboratory robotics is the act of using robots in biology, chemistry or engineering labs. For example, pharmaceutical companies employ robots to move biological or chemical samples around to synthesize novel chemical entities or to test pharmaceut ...

* interpret the results from the experiments * repeat the cycle as required The Robot Scientist can autonomously execute high-throughput hypothesis led research. In addition to automating experimentation Robot Scientists are well suited to recording scientific knowledge: as the experiments are conceived and executed automatically by computer, it is possible to completely capture and digitally curate all aspects of the scientific process. Robot Scientist is the first machine to have been demonstrated to have discovered novel scientific knowledge. A new Robot Scientist ''Eve'' is designed to automate drug discovery. Eve automates

high-throughput screening High-throughput screening (HTS) is a method for scientific discovery especially used in drug discovery and relevant to the fields of biology, materials science and chemistry. Using robotics, data processing/control software, liquid handling device ...

, hit confirmation, and

lead generation In marketing, lead generation () is the process of creating consumer interest or inquiry into the products or services of a business. A lead is the contact information and, in some cases, demographic information of a customer who is intereste ...

through QSAR learning and testing. Eve is being applied to the discovery of lead compounds for

neglected tropical diseases Neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) are a diverse group of tropical infections that are common in low-income populations in developing regions of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. They are caused by a variety of pathogens, such as viruses, bacteri ...

. King's research has been funded by the

EPSRC The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to univers ...

and the

BBSRC Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), and is the largest UK public funder of non-medical bioscience. It predominantly funds scientific res ...

European Union The European Union (EU) is a supranational union, supranational political union, political and economic union of Member state of the European Union, member states that are Geography of the European Union, located primarily in Europe. The u ...

HEFCW The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) was the Welsh Government Sponsored Body responsible for funding the higher education sector. It was replaced by Medr, the Commission for Tertiary Education and Research from August 2024. ...

, the

Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senio ...

and

JISC Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit organisation that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education and research, as well as the public sector. Its head office is based in Bristol with ...

. He worked at

Aberystwyth University Aberystwyth University () is a Public university, public Research university, research university in Aberystwyth, Wales. Aberystwyth was a founding member institution of the former federal University of Wales. The university has over 8,000 stude ...

for 15 years then moved to Manchester in January 2012. He left the School of Computer Science at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...

in 2019 and moved to Chalmers University of Technology. He has an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with success indicators such as winning t ...

of 54 according to

Google Scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

Collaborations

In 2000 King was a founder of the spin-out company PharmaDM, which developed data mining tools for the

pharmaceutical industry The pharmaceutical industry is a medical industry that discovers, develops, produces, and markets pharmaceutical goods such as medications and medical devices. Medications are then administered to (or self-administered by) patients for curing ...

. The company was based largely on research applying data mining to

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

and

chemoinformatics Cheminformatics (also known as chemoinformatics) refers to the use of physical chemistry theory with computer and information science techniques—so called "''in silico''" techniques—in application to a range of descriptive and prescriptive pr ...

. The other scientific founders come from the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

and Leuven. King has also developed an

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

for converting protein coding

DNA sequence A nucleic acid sequence is a succession of bases within the nucleotides forming alleles within a DNA (using GACT) or RNA (GACU) molecule. This succession is denoted by a series of a set of five different letters that indicate the order of the nu ...

s into music with Colin Angus of

The Shamen The Shamen ( ) were a Scottish psychedelic band, formed in 1985 in Aberdeen, who became a chart-topping electronic dance music act on the UK Singles Chart by the early 1990s. The founding members were Colin Angus, Derek McKenzie and Keith Mc ...

. The song ''S2-translation'' based on this is in the ''Rough Guide to Rock'', and was on an album that sold more than 100,000 copies.

External links

Ross D. King
on VideoLectures.net

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:King, Ross D. Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Alumni of the University of Aberdeen Alumni of Newcastle University Alumni of the University of Strathclyde Academics of the University of Manchester Academics of Aberystwyth University People associated with the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Academic staff of the Chalmers University of Technology