Charles Ling is a Professor of Computer Science and and a Science Distinguished Research Professor at Western University. He is also the Director of the Data Mining and Business Intelligence Lab , a fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE), an Associate Scientist at the Lawson Health Research Institute and a Senior member of IEEE.

Professor Charles Ling has been researching machine learning, AI, and cognitive science for over 30 years.  In the 1990s he worked with Marin Marinov, a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy, on the debate between connectionist and symbolic systems, and published papers in Cognition and Cognitive Science.