Ashwin received his Ph.D. from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in 1991. His dissertation examined the use of defeasible logic for the photo-interpretation of remotely sensed data and investigated the comparative advantage of this representation over methods like Multivariate Gaussian Analysis and Dempster Shafer Theory. During the latter half of 1990, he developed a non-monotonic logic-based system for interpreting chemical pathology data. This was awarded the Pacific Diagnostic's Prize and recommended for use in all hospitals in the state of New South Wales. In 1991, Ashwin joined the ILP group at the Turing Institute, Scotland and---with S. Muggleton (now at Imperial College, London)--- worked on the application of Algorithmic Information Theory to noise-detection and non-monotonic learning in ILP. From 1993, Ashwin was a member of the
Oxford University Computing Laboratory, where he was involved in pioneering applications of ILP systems to difficult real-world problems in molecular biology and chemistry. From 1998-2000 he was the
Nuffield Trust Research Fellow in Medical Mathematics and a Research Fellow of
Green College , Oxford. In 2001, he was appointed to a University Lecturership in Computation at Oxford and a Fellowship in Computation at
St Peter's College. Prior to this, he has also been a member of
Wolfson College , Oxford. In 2003, he moved to the IBM Research – India, as a Research Staff Member. In 2009, he was awarded a Ramanujan Fellowship by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India. In 2010, he took up the post of Professor at the newly formed South Asian University, and became the founder Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science. He moved to the IIIT-D in Sept. 2012 and in Jan 2015 to BITS-Pilani, Goa. He was also a Visiting Professor at the Computing Laboratory, University of Oxford and is a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales.