Allan Ramsay

Way back in the early 1970s, I was doing my undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex and a couple of far-sighted professors (Max Clowes, Aaron Sloman) put on a course on AI. That sounds interesting, I thought. Certainly more interesting that yet another course in pure maths. So I took it, and it was indeed interesting.

And then I got a job as a programmer (yes, there were such things as programmers in the 1970s), but I didn't like working so went back to university, first to do an MSc in logic and then, yes, back to Sussex to do a PhD in AI.

Back then, there wasn't actually very much AI around. You could pretty well read every thesis that had ever been published, so there was lots of scope for choosing what you wanted to work on. I actually shared an office with Geoff Hinton, which shows how small the world of AI was then. So I read a few things, and then I wrote a thesis called "Understanding English descriptions of programs", which wasn't too bad for then, though it would hardly stand up to scrutiny now.

And that led to me getting a position lecturing in Computer Science at the University of Essex, and then in AI back at Sussex, and then as a Professor of AI at University College Dublin and then finally as a Professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Manchester. That was all good fun, and over the years I've watch AI grow and change, and I've worked on a wide range of area in NLP, from using DNNs to classify the accents of Arabic speakers to thinking about how to apply AI planning algorithms to understand sarcasm.

And now I'm retired, and spend as much of my time as I can playing tennis. But the last of my PhD students, Tariq Ahmad, did some interesting work on emotion mining, and that led to our book Machine Learning for Emotion Analysis: Understand the emotion behind every story. I hope you enjoy it.

(but my proudest achievement remains the fact that I hold the record for the highest score in Irish cricket: https://www.irishtimes.com/sport/20-20-format-has-potential-to-be-winner-1.472841)