Peter J. Bentley

Developer of the iPhone application iStethoscope and pioneer of Digital Biology, Bentley is a British author and computer scientist based at University College London. He has served as a Reader and College Fellow at UCL and a Collaborating Professor at KAIST. Bentley has also been a popular science author and consultant, as well as a contributing editor for WIRED UK, and has served as the monthly host of the Royal Institution's cafe scientifique.

Born in Colchester, England, he achieved a B.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Essex (supervised by Edward Tsang) and a Ph.D. in Evolutionary Design (supervised by Jonathan Wakefield) at the age of 24. His doctorate thesis was entitled Generic Evolutionary Design of Solid Objects using a Genetic Algorithm. From 1997 he performed research into evolutionary computation, artificial life, swarm intelligence, artificial immune systems, artificial neural networks and other types of biologically inspired computing, which he termed Digital Biology. Bentley has served as head of the Digital Biology Interest Group at the Department of Computer Science, University College London.

He participated in science festivals and public events, such as the debate on Complexity and Evolution held at the Natural History Museum in July 2007 with Richard Dawkins, Steve Jones (biologist), and Lewis Wolpert. His research has been described in several articles of New Scientist. Bentley's more recent research has focused on morphological computation and novel architectures designed for natural computation based on evolution, developmental and self-assembling systems.

He also received publicity for his iPhone application iStethoscope, which was developed in collaboration with cardiologists in the USA. The app has been used to gather heart sounds from people around the world in a research project to enable computers to diagnose heart disease automatically using machine learning.