Professor Toby Walsh FAA - Artificial Intelligence

Gepp’s 1977-1982

Toby was a scholar, prefect, head of house and editor of the Felstedian.

Toby won a scholarship to St. John's College, Cambridge and then completed a Masters and PhD at the Department of Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University. He remembers “I was heavily involved with Chris Dawkins' Computer Society. Felsted had an old mainframe computer which we used to do lots of jobs around the school like typeset the Christmas carols. By the time I left, we had one of the first Ethernet networks and some of the earliest personal computers. 

This was more than a decade before PCs and networks became common so it was ground breaking technology for the time. I have very fond memories of my years in Gepp's House.” Toby is currently Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at UNSW Sydney and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. He has been one of the leading voices at the UN and elsewhere in the campaign against lethal autonomous weapons, or to use their media friendly name “killer robots”.