Profile of Professor Stephen H. Muggleton

Prof. Muggleton's career has concentrated on the development of theory, implementations and applications of Machine Learning, particularly in the field of Inductive Logic Programming. Over the last decade he has collaborated increasingly with biological colleagues, in particular Prof Mike Sternberg, on applications of Machine Learning to Biological prediction tasks. These tasks have included the determination of protein structure, the activity of drugs and toxins and the assignment of gene function.

Stephen Muggleton is Director of the Syngenta University Innovation Centre at Imperial College and holds a Royal Academy of Engineering/Syngenta Research Chair. He received his BSc in Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh in 1982. His PhD research, on the topic Inductive Acquisition of Expert Knowledge was carried out at Edinburgh University under the supervision of Prof. Donald Michie  He was awarded his PhD in 1986.

During the period 1986-1990 he was a Turing Institute Research Fellow. In 1990 he was awarded a British SERC Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 1993 he was awarded a 5-year EPSRC Adanced Research Fellowship at Oxford University Computing Laboratory, where he founded and headed the Machine Learning Research Group. During the same year he took up an invitation to the Fujitsu Chair as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo. While working at the University of Oxford he was awarded honorary MA status, elected Research Fellow at Wolfson College and was tutor at Corpus Christi College. In 1997 he was made Reader by the Distinctions Committee of the University of Oxford. In October 1997 he took up the Chair of Machine Learning at the University of York and set up and headed a new research group for the University. In July 2001 he took up the Joint Research Council Funded Chair of Computational Inference and Bioinformatics at the Department of Computing, Imperial College. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 2002. In 2005 he became Director of Modelling at the new Centre for Integrative Systems Biology at Imperial College (CISBIC) and in 2008 was elected as both a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and a Fellow of the British Computer Society (BCS). In 2010 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2011 he was elected a board member of the International Machine Learning Society and a Fellow of the Society for Biology. In 2014 he was elected as a Fellow of ECCAI.

Stephen Muggleton's intellectual contributions within Machine Learning include the introduction of definitions for Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), Predicate Invention, Inverse Resolution, Closed World Specialisation, Predicate Utility, Layered Learning, U-learnability, Self-saturation and Stochastic logic programs. His keynote invited talks at international conferences include the Algorithmic Learning Theory Conference (1991,1993), the European Conference on Machine Learning (1993), a joint meeting of the ACM Computational Learning Theory Conference and the International Machine Learning Conference (1994), the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (1995), the International Conference on Logic Programming (1995), the Conference of the Royal Statistical Society (2000) and the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (2002), the International Conference on Computational Methods in Systems Biology (2005), AAAI Fellows Symposium (2006), Royal Institution (2007), International Conference on Future Challenges for Systems Biology (2008), British Computer Society Visions of Computing Conference (2008), International Conference on Machine Learning Applications (2009), SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (2010), European Conference on Artificial Intelligence special session on Alan Turing (2012), International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning (2013).

He is/has been an editorial board member of the Machine Learning Journal, the Journal of Logic Programming, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, the AI Journal, the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, Cognitive Science and Theory and Practice of Logic Programming. He was Executive Editor of the Oxford University Press series Machine Intelligence from 1992 and has been Editor-in-Chief of the series since 2000.

At York he was the principal investigator of the ESPRIT Framework IV LTR ILP2 project, the EPSRC project on Distribution-based Machine Learning, the ILPnet network of excellence, the MLnet network of excellence, the BBSRC-EPSRC project Mining Knowledge of Protein Topology, the Smith-Kline Beecham supported project on Machine Discovery of Neuropeptide sequence motifs and the EPSRC Closed Loop Machine Learning project. He was principal investigator (at the Turing Institute) of the ESPRIT Framework II BRA project ECOLES (1989-1992). He was also principal investigator and Methods Coordinator (Turing Institute), of the ESPRIT Framework II StatLog project (1990-1992), principal investigator (Turing Institute/Oxford) of the SERC Rule-Based Systems project during 1991-1994, principal investigator (Oxford) of the SERC Developments of ILP project during 1993-1996 and principal investigator (Oxford) of the ESPRIT Framework III ILP project during 1992-1995. Prof. Muggleton lectured postgraduate and undergraduate courses on Logic Programming and ILP at Oxford, and at York. He gave a similar course as Visiting Associate Professor, Fujitsu Chair, at University of Tokyo in 1993.

Stephen Muggleton has had invited research visits at the following institutions: Japansese Fifth Generation Centre in Tokyo - ICOT (1989), University of New South Wales (1989), University of Tokyo (1993), University of California at Santa Cruz (1995), Newton Institute in Cambridge (1997,1998), Stanford University (2000), INRIA Paris (2003), National Institute for Informatics Tokyo (2009), Carnegie Mellon University (2014), MIT (2014).

He has acted as industrial consultant for Pfizer UK, British Telecom, Intelligent Terminals Ltd, Marks and Spencer, Smith Engineering, Gilde Investment Management, Zen Bioscience, Future Route Ltd and Astellas Corp.