Peter Cowling

Professor Peter Cowling (IEEE) is a 50th Anniversary Professor of Computer Science and Management at the University of York. His work centres on computerised decision-making in games, scheduling and resource-constrained optimisation. He has worked with a wide range of industrial partners, been a Director of two research spin-out companies, and he’s published over 90 scientific papers in high-quality journals and conferences. He’s also an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.

“I wrote my first game playing Artificial Intelligence (AI), for the board game Othello, at about nine years of age. I was quickly hooked and have created many games and Artificial Intelligence for games as a way to test out research ideas in AI during my research career. A University visit as a young teenager raised my aspirations a good deal (my teachers couldn't imagine working as a professional scientist), and now I try to do school visits and open days whenever I can to repay the debt I owe to those people who inspired me as a teenager. Now, with the rise of the games industry, games are an economically and socially important area of research and are the principal area in which I work.

“I enjoy working with sparky, interesting people be they students, researchers, admin staff, catering staff or academics. The University of York is full of them! I love designing and writing programmes, usually as part of a small team, especially algorithms to search things like the space of possible futures for a game, or to look through and understand how we can get knowledge from data.”