Nigel Shadbolt

Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt (born 9 April 1956) is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, and Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Tim Berners-Lee. He is also a visiting professor in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Shadbolt is an interdisciplinary researcher, policy expert and commentator. His research focuses on understanding how intelligent behaviour is embodied and emerges in humans, machines and, most recently, on the Web, and has made contributions to the fields of Psychology, Cognitive science, Computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Computer science and the emerging field of Web science. Education Shadbolt was born in London but adopted and raised in the Derbyshire village of Ashford-in-the-Water, living a "bucolic existence" until he went to university. He went to Lady Manners School, then a grammar school. He obtained an undergraduate degree in philosophy and psychology at Newcastle University. His PhD degree was received from the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. His thesis resulted in a framework for understanding how human dialogue is organised and was supervised by Barry Richards and Henry S. Thompson. Research and career Shadbolt's research has been in Artificial Intelligence since the late 1970s working on a broad range of topics; from natural language understanding and robotics through to expert systems, computational neuroscience, memory through to the semantic web and linked data. He also writes on the wider implications of his research. One example is the book he co-authored with Kieron O'Hara that examines privacy and trust in the Digital Age – The Spy in the Coffee Machine. His most recent research is on the topic of social machines – understanding the emergent problem solving that arises from a combination of humans, computers and data at web scale. The SOCIAM project on social machines is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). In 1983, Shadbolt moved to the University of Nottingham and joined the Department of Psychology. From 2000 to 2015 he was professor of artificial intelligence in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton.