Nigel Shadbolt | |
---|---|
Born | Nigel Richard Shadbolt 9 April 1956 [1] London, England |
Education | Lady Manners School |
Alma mater | |
Known for | |
Spouse(s) | Beverly Saunders (m. 1992) |
Awards | Knight Bachelor (2013) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Constituting Reference in Natural Language: The Problem of Referential Opacity (1986) |
Doctoral advisor | |
Doctoral students | |
Website | www |
Sir Nigel Richard Shadbolt (born 9 April 1956) [1] is Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, [10] 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, computer science and the emerging field of web science. [4] [11] [3] [12] [13] [14]
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. [15] He went to Lady Manners School, then a state-funded grammar school. He obtained an undergraduate degree in philosophy and psychology from Newcastle University, then received his Ph.D. from the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. [7] His thesis resulted in a framework for understanding how human dialogue is organised and was supervised by Barry Richards and Henry S. Thompson. [7]
Shadbolt's research has been in Artificial Intelligence since the late 1970s [3] [4] [12] [16] [17] [18] working on a broad range of topics; from natural language understanding and robotics [19] through to expert systems, computational neuroscience, memory [20] through to the semantic web [2] and linked data. [21] 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. [22] 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 [23] project on social machines is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). [24]
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.
From 2000 to 2007, he led and directed the Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration (IRC). [25] It produced a broad range of Semantic Web research, including how diverse information could be harvested and integrated [26] and how semantics could help computers systems recommend content.
In 2006 Shadbolt was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering [1] (FREng). He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and was its President in its 50th jubilee year. That same year, Nigel Shadbolt, Tim Berners-Lee, [27] Wendy Hall and Daniel Weitzner, founded the Web Science Research Initiative, to promote the discipline of Web Science [28] and foster research collaboration between the University of Southampton and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
From 2007 to 2011 Shadbolt was deputy head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton, from 2011 to 2014 he was head of the Web and Internet Science Group, the first research group dedicated to the study of Web science and Internet science, within ECS, comprising 140 staff, researchers and PhD students.
His Semantic Web research led to the formation of Garlik, [29] offering identity protection services. In 2008, Garlik was awarded Technology Pioneer status by the Davos World Economic Forum and won the UK BT Flagship IT Award. Experian acquired Garlik in November 2011. [30]
In June 2009 he was appointed together with Tim Berners-Lee as Information Advisor to the UK Government. The two led a team to develop data.gov.uk, a single point of access for UK non-personal Governmental public data. [31] [32] In May 2010 he was appointed by the UK Coalition Government to the Public Sector Transparency Board responsible for setting open data standards across the public sector and developing the legal Right to Data.
In December 2012, Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee formally launched the Open Data Institute. The ODI focuses on incubating and nurturing new businesses wanting to harness open data, training and promoting standards. In 2013, Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee joined the board of advisors of tech startup State.com, creating a network of structured opinions on the semantic web. [33] On 1 August 2015 he was appointed principal of Jesus College, Oxford and a professorial research fellow in the Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford.
Shadbolt was interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili on The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4 in April 2015. [53] In 2016, he delivered the Hinton Lecture of the Royal Academy of Engineering, entitled "Engineering the Future of Data". [54] [1]
Shadbolt is married to Bev Saunders, a designer, and has two children. [1]
The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, the HTML markup language, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The Lovelace Medal was established by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT in 1998, and is presented to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the understanding or advancement of computing. It is the top award in computing in the UK. Awardees deliver the Lovelace Lecture.
The Department of Computer Science is the computer science department of the University of Oxford, England, which is part of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division. It was founded in 1957 as the Computing Laboratory. By 2014 the staff count was 52 members of academic staff and over 80 research staff. The 2019, 2020 and 2021 Times World University Subject Rankings places Oxford University 1st in the world for Computer Science. Oxford University is also the top university for computer science in the UK and Europe according to Business Insider. The 2020 QS University Subject Rankings places The University of Oxford 5th in the world for Computer Science.
James Alexander Hendler is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
Mary Lee Berners-Lee was an English mathematician and computer scientist who worked in a team that developed programs in the Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers. She was the mother of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Mike Berners-Lee, an English researcher and writer on greenhouse gases.
Semantic publishing on the Web, or semantic web publishing, refers to publishing information on the web as documents accompanied by semantic markup. Semantic publication provides a way for computers to understand the structure and even the meaning of the published information, making information search and data integration more efficient.
The Web Science Trust (WST) is a UK Charitable Trust with the aim of supporting the global development of Web science. It was originally started in 2006 as a joint effort between MIT and University of Southampton to formalise the social and technical aspects of the World Wide Web. The trust coordinates a set of international "WSTNet Laboratories" that include academic research groups in the emerging area of Web science.
Web science is an emerging interdisciplinary field concerned with the study of large-scale socio-technical systems, particularly the World Wide Web. It considers the relationship between people and technology, the ways that society and technology co-constitute one another and the impact of this co-constitution on broader society. Web Science combines research from disciplines as diverse as sociology, computer science, economics, and mathematics.
Carole Anne Goble, is a British academic who is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She is principal investigator (PI) of the myGrid, BioCatalogue and myExperiment projects and co-leads the Information Management Group (IMG) with Norman Paton.
Ian Robert Horrocks is a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford in the UK and a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His research focuses on knowledge representation and reasoning, particularly ontology languages, description logic and optimised tableaux decision procedures.
Semantic HTML is the use of HTML markup to reinforce the semantics, or meaning, of the information in web pages and web applications rather than merely to define its presentation or look. Semantic HTML is processed by traditional web browsers as well as by many other user agents. CSS is used to suggest how it is presented to human users.
Dame Wendy Hall is a British computer scientist. She is Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
data.gov.uk is a UK Government project to make available non-personal UK government data as open data. It was launched as closed beta in 30 September 2009, and publicly launched in January 2010. As of February 2015, it contained over 19,343 datasets, rising to over 40,000 in 2017, and more than 47,000 by 2023. data.gov.uk is listed in the Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data.org.
David Charles De Roure is an English computer scientist who is a professor of e-Research at the University of Oxford, where he is responsible for Digital Humanities in The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), and is a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. He is a supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, and Oxford Martin School Senior Alumni Fellow.
Jenifer Fays Alys Tennison is a British software engineer and consultant who co-chairs the data governance working group within the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI). She also serves on the board of directors of Creative Commons, the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD) and the information law and policy centre of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) at the University of London. She was previously Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Open Data Institute (ODI).
A social machine is an environment comprising humans and technology interacting and producing outputs or action which would not be possible without both parties present. It can also be regarded as a machine, in which specific tasks are performed by human participants, whose interaction is mediated by an infrastructure. The growth of social machines has been greatly enabled by technologies such as the Internet, the smartphone, social media and the World Wide Web, by connecting people in new ways.
Daniel J. Weitzner is the director of the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative and principal research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab CSAIL. He teaches Internet public policy in MIT's Computer Science Department. His research includes development of accountable systems architectures to enable the Web to be more responsive to policy requirements.
The Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC) is part of the Department of Engineering Science within the University of Oxford in England and is a multidisciplinary informatics and Data science research and education institute.