Smart Industry 1/2016

Demis Hassabis of DeepMind
The Brain
Behind the Brain
The victory of an artificially intelligent
computer program called
AlphaGo created by DeepMind, a
British company owned by Google,
over the world champion at the ancient
Chinese board game of Go, Lee
Sedol, caused quite a stir earlier this
spring. Go, it turns out, is far more
complicated than chess, a game in
which IBM’s “Deep Blue” computer
managed to beat the then-reigning
world champion Garry Kasparov, as
far back as 1996.
The mastermind behind this record
achievement received little
attention in the press, though. Demis
Hassabis, co-founder and chief
executive of DeepMind, was born
in London as the son of a Chinese-
Singaporean mother and a father
of Greek-Cypriot descent. He began
working on artificial intelligence as
a computer science undergraduate
at Cambridge University and founded
the company together with
Mustafa Suleyman, a technologist
I know how
to play Go
well enough
to be able to
appreciate its
beauty.
Demis Hassabis
and childhood friend, and sold it to
Google for £400m in 2014.
DeepMind is a neural network which
works like the human brain. It is capable
of teaching itself and learning
from experience. In fact, it mastered
the complicated rules of Go without
human assistance. Mr. Hassabis,
who became a chess master when
he was still 13 and has competed in
the Mind Sports Olympiad, an annual
festival for games of mental skill,
served as the machine’s trainer and
sparring partner, but the cognitive
achievement was all AlphaGo’s own.
Go originated 2,500 years ago in
China and is played by an estimated
40m people worldwide, including
more than 1,000 professional players.
“I know how to play Go well enough
to be able to appreciate its beauty”
Mr. Hassabis told the Financial Times
“but it is not one of the games I’m
strong at, so I’ve not actually played
AlphaGo myself as it surpassed my
ability almost from the beginning.”
In March, AlphaGo wrapped up
the five-game series against Mr.
Lee (who is considered the best Go
player in the world over the last decade)
by winning four times, in the
process taking home a prize of one
million U.S. dollars.
Will MacHugh of Eltopia:
Hive Computing
Takes Off
In 2012, Will MacHugh was strolling
through a country fair in California
when he discovered a display about
beekeeping, a subject about which
he knew nothing whatsoever. As
president of Eltopia Communications,
a service provider for wireless
operators in the U.S. Northwest, he
is concerned with putting together
cellular networks. But the idea of
helping beekeepers solve their problems
captivated him, and he went
back to Oregon with his head full
of ideas. One of the biggest problems
facing apiarists are mites: tiny
arthropods that live as parasites on
plants, animals and yes, bees. Previously,
the only way beekeepers
could combat mites was by placing
their beehives in an oven and literally
toasting them. MacHugh and
his team decided to attack the problem
from another angle. They
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