Hassabis, Demis
<p>Jul 7, 2010 9:49 AM (also see liquid drum and base; recomm by Demis)
born 1976... 34 yr old prodigy... works with Eleanor Maguire. UK.
computer game designer, AI programmer, neurosci, games player.
Master chess player at 13.
Long career as teenager as a game designer.
He founded Elixir Studies in 1998... grew it to 60 people.
The game Evil Genius scored better.
In 2005 he switched to cognitive neuroscience... a desire to get back to developing AI technology.
He works in field of autobiograph memory and amnesia.
Most impt work on HC and imagination. HC damage causes failure of imagination.
citing a desire to get back to developing artificial intelligence technology[1]. Working in the field of <strong>autobiographical memory a</strong>nd amnesia he had several papers published in 2007. His most important work to date was published in the <strong>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in early 2007[2] </strong>and demonstrated that patients with damage to their hippocampus, known to cause amnesia, were also<strong> unable to imagine themselves in new experiences</strong>. Importantly this established a link between<strong> the constructive process of imagination and the reconstructive process of episodic memory recall</strong>. Based on these findings and a follow-up fMRI study[3], Hassabis developed his ideas into a <strong>new theoretical account of the episodic memory system identifying scene construction, the generation and online maintenance of a complex and coherent scene, as a key process underlying both memory recall and imagination[</strong>4]. This work was covered in the mainstream media[5] and this area was listed in the top 10 scientific breakthroughs of the year (at number 9) by the journal Science[6]. He received his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCL in 2009 and is continuing his computational neuroscience research at the Gatsby Unit, UCL and in collaboration with groups at MIT and Harvard.</p>