Professor Robert Kowalski studied at the University of Chicago, the University of Bridgeport, Stanford University, and the University of Warsaw, before completing his PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 1970. He was a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh until 1975, when he joined Imperial College London, becoming Professor of Computational Logic in 1983.
During the 1980s, Kowalski was heavily involved in the British response to the Japanese Fifth Generation Project. At its peak in 1987, the Logic Programming Group, which he headed at the time, numbered approximately 50 researchers and support staff. He also served as an advisor to the UNDP Knowledge Based Systems Project in India and to DFKI, the German Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He co-ordinated the European Community Basic Research Project, Compulog, and was the founder of the European Compulog Network of Excellence. He served as the Head of the Department of Computing at Imperial College from 1997 to 1999, after which he was appointed Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Fellow. Since 2009, he has been an advisor to the World Health Organisation.
Kowalski is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence, and the Association for Computing Machinery. He received the IJCAI (International Joint Conference of Artificial Intelligence) award for Research Excellence in 2011.
Kowalski’s book Computational Logic and Human Thinking – How to be Artificially Intelligent was published by Cambridge University Press in July 2011.