Noel Sharkey | |
---|---|
Born | 14 December 1948 |
Awards | |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer Science, Robotics |
Institutions | University of Sheffield |
Website | noelsharkey |
Noel Sharkey (born 14 December 1948) is a computer scientist born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is best known to the British public for his appearances on television as an expert on robotics; including the BBC Two television series Robot Wars and Techno Games , and co-hosting Bright Sparks for BBC Northern Ireland. He is emeritus professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield. [1]
Sharkey chairs the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, [2] an NGO that is seeking an International treaty to prohibit the development and use of autonomous robot weapons – weapons that once launched can select human targets and kill them without human intervention. He is co-founder and co-director of the Foundation for Responsible Robotics.
Sharkey is the founding editor of the academic journal Connection Science, and an editor for Artificial Intelligence Review and Robotics and Autonomous Systems.[ citation needed ]
Sharkey held a chair in the Department of Computer Science (from 1994) at the University of Sheffield, [1] and then he was a professor of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and a professor of Public Engagement. He was supported by an EPSRC Senior Media Fellowship and a Leverhulme Fellowship of the ethics of battlefield robots.[ citation needed ]
Previously Sharkey held a number of interdisciplinary research and teaching positions in the US (Yale Computer Science and Stanford Psychology) and the UK (Essex Language and Linguistics, Exeter Computer Science). He was director of the Centre for Cognitive Science at University of Essex and Director of the Centre for Connection Science at the University of Sheffield.[ citation needed ]
He holds a doctorate in psychology, a doctorate in science, is a chartered electrical engineer, a chartered information technology professional, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET), a fellow of the British Computer Society, a fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). [3]
In 2014 Sharkey received an honorary doctorate in Informatics from the University of Skövde, Sweden.
In the academic world, Sharkey is best known for his contribution to machine learning and cognitive science with more than 150 scientific articles and books.
Since 2006, Sharkey has written and spoken widely concerning the ethical responsibilities of governments and international organisations in a world where robotics applications are dramatically increasing, both in the military and policing contexts. [4] He has also written widely on the ethical danger and societal impact of robotics in childcare, elder care, surgery, medicine, transport, and sex.
Sharkey appeared as an expert on all four series of the BBC Two television Techno Games . [5] and as head judge of every televised series of Robot Wars throughout the world (1998–2003) and again as head judge in the later Robot Wars reboot on BBC Two (2016). He co-hosted Bright Sparks , a science and engineering challenge series, for BBC Northern Ireland, and produces and presents a weekly radio show for the community radio station Sheffield Live! called The Sound of Science.
Sharkey has set up and organised robot competitions for young people around the world, including the national Chinese creative robotics contest, and the national Egyptian schools AI and robotics contest.
Apart from Sharkey's work on popular TV he is also regularly interviewed for radio, magazines, TV and newspapers about issues concerned with the responsible use of robots and Artificial Intelligence. Sharkey's interview on BBC Radio 4's The Life Scientific provides insight into his life story. He also writes for newspapers, magazines and news sites.
Sharkey resides in Sheffield with his wife Amanda and has five daughters.[ citation needed ]
Kevin Warwick is an English engineer and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research concerning robotics.
Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI). He co-founded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory and wrote several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
Stuart Jonathan Russell is a British computer scientist known for his contributions to artificial intelligence (AI). He is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley and was from 2008 to 2011 an adjunct professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. He holds the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. He founded and leads the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. Russell is the co-author with Peter Norvig of the authoritative textbook of the field of AI: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries.
Rodney Allen Brooks is an Australian roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics. He was a Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot and co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of Rethink Robotics and currently is the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Robust.AI.
Judea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks. He is also credited for developing a theory of causal and counterfactual inference based on structural models. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded Pearl with the Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science, "for fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning". He is the author of several books, including the technical Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference, and The Book of Why, a book on causality aimed at the general public.
Michael Anthony Arbib is an American computational neuroscientist. He is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of California at San Diego and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California; before his 2016 retirement he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of computer science, as well as a professor of biological sciences, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, neuroscience and psychology.
Owen Holland is professor emeritus of cognitive robotics (Informatics) in the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. He was until recently a professor of computer science at the University of Essex, England. Previously, he has held faculty positions at Caltech, University of Bielefeld, Starlab and the University of the West of England.
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.
Margaret Ann Boden is a Research Professor of Cognitive Science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex, where her work embraces the fields of artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, and cognitive and computer science.
Aaron Sloman is a philosopher and researcher on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He held the Chair in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, and before that a chair with the same title at the University of Sussex. Since retiring he is Honorary Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at Birmingham. He has published widely on philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence; he also collaborated widely, e.g. with biologist Jackie Chappell on the evolution of intelligence.
Yorick Alexander Wilks FBCS was a British computer scientist. He was an emeritus professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Sheffield, visiting professor of artificial intelligence at Gresham College, senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, senior scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, and a member of the Epiphany Philosophers.
Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.
George A. Bekey is an American roboticist and the Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California.
Ruzena Bajcsy is an American engineer and computer scientist who specializes in robotics. She is professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also director emerita of CITRIS.
Dr Blay Whitby is a philosopher and technology ethicist, specialising in computer science, artificial intelligence and robotics. He is based at the University of Sussex, England.
Sir John Michael Brady is an emeritus professor of oncological imaging at the University of Oxford. He has been a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, since 1985 and was elected a foreign associate member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2015. He was formerly BP Professor of Information Engineering at Oxford from 1985 to 2010 and a senior research scientist in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1980 to 1985.
Sethu Vijayakumar FRSE is Professor of Robotics at the University of Edinburgh and a judge on the BBC2 show Robot Wars. He is the Programme co-Director for Artificial Intelligence at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, with the responsibility for defining and driving the institute's Robotics and Autonomous Systems agenda. He co-founded the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics in 2015 and was instrumental in bringing the first NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot out of the United States of America, and to Europe, where is it a focus of research at the School of Informatics. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2013.
Joanna Joy Bryson is professor at Hertie School in Berlin. She works on Artificial Intelligence, ethics and collaborative cognition. She has been a British citizen since 2007.
Aimee van Wynsberghe is Alexander von Humboldt professor for "Applied Ethics of Artificial Intelligence" at the University of Bonn, Germany. As founder of the Bonn Sustainable AI Lab and director of the Institute for Science and Ethics, Aimee van Wynsberghe hosts every two years the Bonn Sustainable AI Conference.
Alan Winfield is a British engineer and educator. He is Professor of Robot Ethics at UWE Bristol, Honorary Professor at the University of York, and Associate Fellow in the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He chairs the advisory board of the Responsible Technology Institute, University of Oxford.