Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science.  He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee.  He was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’.  

Nigel has a degree in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Newcastle and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. In 1983 he joined the Department of Psychology at Nottingham and in 1992 he became the Allan Standen Professor of Intelligent Systems. He moved to Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science in 2000, where he researched the next generation of the World Wide Web and was the first Head of the Web and Internet Science Group.  At Oxford he has focused his research in human centred AI in a wide range of applications.  

With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web.  In 2018 he published The Digital Ape: how to live (in peace) with smart machines, described as a ‘landmark book’.

He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.