Suzanne’s interests lie in understanding the human mind well enough to allow us to create artificially intelligent minds for General Purpose Robots. To put a mind into a robot, you need to understand everything, including consciousness. Suzanne has explored and built pioneering technologies in the fields of robotics, AI, and quantum computing for over a decade. Her new project (still in stealth) seeks to understand consciousness such that we can integrate it into AI and robots in a way that increases the safety of such systems, and maximally benefits society.

Suzanne co-founded and was CTO of Sanctuary AI, building Human-Like Intelligence in General Purpose Robots. Before Sanctuary, Suzanne also founded Kindred AI in 2014, the world’s first robotics company to use reinforcement learning in a production environment. The acquisition of Kindred by Ocado in November 2020 was the third-largest exit for a robotics company in Canadian history. Suzanne also has deep expertise in quantum computing from her time at D-Wave Systems, where she ported AI algorithms to D-Wave’s quantum annealing hardware. She also invented and implemented MAXCAT, the world’s first game ever played against a quantum computer, worked on the world’s first supervised classifier run on a quantum computer and was the first person to control the motion of a robot using a quantum computer. Suzanne holds a Ph.D. in experimental physics from the University of Birmingham. She is also a published digital artist and poet, has worked as a graphic designer, and pioneered a technique for creating art using a quantum computer. In her spare time, she loves mixed media art and painting, meditating, EDM music and dancing.