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Read the second edition of our AI Leaders series, where we profile the leaders ensuring the UK is AI Ready.

techUK has launched a year long campaign to promote the AI Leaders helping to make the UK AI ready.

Every month we will promote an individual that is helping organisations across both the public and private sector to realise the economic benefits and social power of AI technologies.

If you are an AI leader, or know someone that is, get in touch with techUK to see how you can get involved!

This month’s AI Leader is Ken Mulvany, Founder and Director at Benevolent AI.

We asked Ken 10 questions about his work and experiences with AI. Read on for a taster and find the full interview below. 

What is your current role and responsibilities?

Founder and chairman. I founded the company in 2013 to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to change the way knowledge is created and applied in Life Sciences.

What is your background that led you to AI?

The idea came from my experience of founding and running Proximagen, a biotech (sold in 2012 for $555m). I saw an exponential rise in the volume of scientific information and how the scientific industry was finding it impossible to read and use all that vast complex data effectively. This was having a negative effect on the rate of new discoveries. I founded BenevolentAI to try and do two very specific things:

i) build a technology that could ingest, read and contextualise all of the worlds’ available bioscience information to establish facts from that information – essentially a definitive connected knowledge of bioscience;

ii) enable the technology to reason on those facts and create completely new ideas and inventions – in the first instance finding treatments and cures for disease.

BenevolentAI has applied its technology to accelerate the discovery of new medicines creating the world’s richest bioscience knowledge graph containing well over 1bn meaningful relationships specific to drug discovery. The technology enables a completely unique understanding of disease and can deliver significantly higher success rates in discovering new medicines and potential cures for disease.

It’s an overused word, but we are ‘unique’ on a number of levels – our business model involves monetising the discoveries the technology creates, not the technology itself. We do not sell or license our software. Our technology focuses on the entire drug discovery process not just one single element of it. We have drug development scientists and technologists working side by side which is unusual, many companies’ tech and bio teams work in total isolation. Most importantly what truly differentiates us as that we apply AI to find new discoveries in the form of new disease target associations. As far as I am aware, all other AI companies that operate in this space only apply AI to existing discoveries i.e. what is already known, we are finding the ‘unknown’.

Download the PDF to find out more about Ken's background and why he got involved in AI.

Techuk AI Leaders Ken Mulvany (PDF)