After a year spent as a programmer at a software company, he studied at the University of Liverpool, where he gained an MSc in Pure Mathematics in 1996.
Colton stayed on as a Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh until 2002, at which point he moved to Imperial College, London as a lecturer in the Department of Computing.
He was appointed Professor of Computational Creativity at Goldsmiths College in 2013 and joined Queen Mary, University of London in 2018.
His work,[3] along with that of Maja Pantić and Michel Valstar, won the British Computing Society Machine Intelligence Award in 2007.
[5] Colton's work with HM included the discovery of refactorable numbers, which appeared to be original but turned out to have been previously discovered.