Question: Do you think you could help people in the future with your work? How so?

David Corne answered on 22 Jun 2011:

I work on many different projects. Most of the time, it is easier to get funding to work on things that help companies make better profits, but this does also lead to improved services for people. I also do work that might develop entirely new ideas that can lead to new companies or businesses, so this provides employment for people. As much as I can, though, I try to use intelligent computing for things that save lives and/or help the environment. It’s a good target to have, but surprisingly hard to achieve — e.g. if I do something that relates to medicine, I have to get the trust of big bits of the medical profession, and the ideas have to go through lots of trials. But this sort of thing can happen, and I keep on trying. In the past I have worked on using intelligent computing to optimise the placement and shape of radiotherapy beams, so that, if you are being treated for a tumour, the radiation treatment will be better at zapping the tumour and do less damage to internal organs. Our tests on real data were successful, showing that, if the hospital used our technique, the patients would be treated better. But, I don’t know if that hospital actually uses our technique. At the moment I am working on using intelligent computing to optimise the way we do chemotherapy – the computer says that if you give certain specific doses of certain specific drugs, over a certain specific schedule of treatment over 10 weeks, then the outcomes for the patient will be much better than the standard types of treatment. The medical community are not sure how much they can trust the computer science models though, so it may take a long time to get this used. One thing I love about my work is that, in the above and in other projects, I work with and train students and young researchers. Often these youngsters then build their own careers, and are now doing things which can give more convincing answers to your question.