I graduated from Birmingham University with a BSc in Artificial Intelligence in 1996.
Given the arcane nature of the field at the time it attracted a rather eclectic bunch of young minds who enjoyed nothing more than to "blow their minds" programming Mandelbrot fractals whilst listening to trip hop.
We also got a front row seat for the rise of the Internet. Reading bulletin boards and surfing the nascent world-wide-web in the cutting edge Mosaic browser.
Despite loving the subject of AI and having many unanswered questions, the draw of this frenzied DotCom boom was too much to resist and after graduating I joined my first startup building web-based applications.
Throughout the next decade I rode the DotCom wave, but never lost my academic interest in AI In my spare time I dived headlong into the literature, and was especially drawn to the new science of Complexity; in particular the beautiful field of Emergence.
By 2004, it was clear that I needed to return to academia to further my studies. The course I chose (Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems) was basically A-Life which itself boils down to being Embodied AI
It was great. The people were fantastic and I loved every minute it. But... academia doesn't pay and despite their awesomeness, the faculty (at the time) was more interested in behaviourist embodiment than emergence.
So I decided, once my masters was complete, to keep focused on my career and return to academia at a later date.