Ben Medlock

As Co-founder and CTO of SwiftKey, Ben invented an intelligent typing system for smartphones that has transformed the text input industry. The software became the global best-selling app on Android and is in use on hundreds of millions of mobile devices worldwide. Based on advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, the system adapts to individual language usage and device interaction. SwiftKey won “most innovative mobile app” at the 2012 GSMA awards, and the company was ranked as the world’s 6th most innovative mobile business by Fast Company.

Ben developed his expertise in NLP and machine learning during eight years of computer science research, which culminated in a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He has reviewed for a number of prominent international journals, and his academic work is published in ACL, the leading conference for NLP research.

Ben returns to Cambridge to explore the political and economic roots of some of the deepest challenges facing our society… increasing cost pressures due to factors such as an ageing population and climate impact, growing wealth inequality and the associated rise of nationalism and populism. He is seeking to identify potential ways to cultivate a fairer society with greater equality of opportunity, along with a sense of commonality and shared purpose.

Given his background in applied AI he is also keen to develop a framework to understand the likely impact of the deployment of advancing AI systems on the above issues, seeking to understand both the opportunity and danger such technologies pose to our society.