Rate My Professor Andrew Cropper

Andrew Cropper is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki and a Principal Investigator at the ELLIS Institute Finland. He joined the University of Helsinki in October 2025 as part of the first group of principal investigators at the ELLIS Institute. Previously, he served as a Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki from 2021 to 2025 and as a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford from 2018 to 2021. Cropper earned his PhD in Computer Science from Imperial College London in 2018, an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Oxford in 2011, and a BSc in Computer Science from Nottingham Trent University in 2009. His career also includes a Research Assistant position at the University of Oxford in 2013.

Cropper's research focuses on inductive logic programming, which combines logical reasoning and machine learning to learn rules from data. His group develops the ILP system Popper and works on AI that reasons like a scientist, forming hypotheses, testing them, and generating human-readable explanations to accelerate discoveries in fields such as genomics, ecology, and pharmacology. Key publications include 'Symbolic metaprogram search improves learning efficiency and explains rule learning in humans' (Nature Communications, 2024), 'Inductive logic programming at 30' (Machine Learning Journal, 2022), 'The automatic computer scientist' (AAAI, 2023), 'Learning large logic programs by going beyond entailment' (IJCAI, 2020), and 'Learning efficient logic programs' (Machine Learning Journal, 2019). He has received the AAAI New Faculty Highlights award in 2023, best paper awards at the ILP conference in 2019, 2018, and 2014 (student paper), an EPSRC Early Career Fellowship (£1.4 million, 2021), and a Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford in 2018. Cropper serves on program committees for conferences including AAAI (2020–2026), IJCAI (2019–2025), and ECAI (2020, 2025), and delivered a keynote at the International Joint Conference on Learning & Reasoning (IJCLR) in 2025.