“To deal with the challenges our world is facing, we have to boost the pace of discovery,” says Dr Edward O Pyzer-Knapp, worldwide research lead for AI enriched modelling and simulation at multinational technology corporation IBM. A man on a mission, if you take only one thing away from meeting the 33-year-old British scientist, it will be that there is an imperative firmly placed on the shoulders of the STEM community to do things better and quicker.
“The need for science has never been more urgent,” says Pyzer-Knapp, and the way to get that message across is to talk about it in simple terms. A passionate advocate for the public understanding of science, he talks continually about “real-world applications”. You get the feeling that he’d be happier with a slightly less intimidating job title, which he accepts is “slightly convoluted”, while his enthusiasm and energy in the AI space appears to be limitless. Apart from his post at IBM, Pyzer-Knapp is...