Keith Leonard Clark (born 29 March 1943) is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, England.

Education

Clark studied Mathematics at Durham University (Hatfield College), graduating in 1964 with a first-class degree. Clark then continued his studies at Cambridge University, taking a second undergraduate degree in Philosophy in 1966. He earned a Ph.D. in 1980 from the University of London with thesis titled Predicate logic as a computational formalism.

Career

Clark undertook Voluntary Service Overseas from 1967 to 1968 as a teacher of Mathematics at a school in Sierra Leone. He lectured in Computer Science at the Mathematics Department of Queen Mary College from 1969 to 1975. In 1975 he moved to Imperial College London, where he became a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and joined Robert Kowalski in setting up the logic programming group. From 1987 to 2009 he was Professor of Computational Logic at Imperial College. Clark's key contributions have been in the field of logic programming. His current research interests include multi-agent systems, cognitive robotics and multi-threading.

Business Interests

In 1980, with colleague Frank McCabe, he founded an Imperial College spin-off company, Logic Programming Associates, to develop and market Prolog systems for microcomputers (micro-Prolog) and to provide consultancy on expert systems and other logic programming applications. The company's star product was MacProlog. It had a user interface exploiting all the graphic user interface primitives of the Mac's OS, and primitives allowing bespoke Prolog-based applications to be built with application specific interfaces. Clark has also acted as a consultant to IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu among other companies.

Selected publications