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Professor Nigel Shadbolt FREng CEng FBCS CITP CPsychol

Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at the University of Southampton and Head of the Web and Internet Science Group. He is a Director of the Web Science Trust, and of the Web Foundation - both organisations have a common commitment to advance our understanding of the Web and promote the Web's positive impact on society.

In June 2009 together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee he was appointed an Information Advisor by the Prime Minister to help transform public access to Government information. A major output of this work has been the widely acclaimed data.gov.uk site - a single point of access for all Government non-personal public data. In May 2010 he was appointed by the 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. He also Chairs the Local Data Panel seeking to promote and develop open data approaches within Local Government.

In its 50th Anniversary year 2006 - 07, Nigel was President of the British Computer Society.  He is a Fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society. In 2011 he was awarded an Honorary DSc by the University of Nottingham.

Between 2000-7, he was the Director of the £7.5m EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT).   AKT was particularly influential in establishing the viability and value of web-based semantic technologies.  He has recently been awarded a further £1.98m by the EPSRC to build on this work in the EnAKTing project. In 2005 the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) began to explore the use of this approach within Government in a pilot project AKTive PSI.

He has been involved in a wide range of entrepreneurial activities. In 2006 he was one of three founding Directors and Chief Technology Officer of Garlik Ltd, a company specialising in consumer products and services to put people and their families in control of their own digital information. In 2008 Garlik was awarded Technology Pioneer status by the Davos World Economic Forum and won the prestigious UK national BT Flagship IT Award. He is a Director of Tacit Connexions a company developing and deploying knowledge management tools, methods and solutions. He is also a founder of Seme4 Ltd a company that specialises in Semantic Web and Linked Data technology and consultancy. He is the co-author of The Spy in the Coffee Machine and has an interest in issues to do with privacy and trust in the Digital age. He was overall series consultant to the BBC’s landmark documentary series The Virtual Revolution.

From 2001 to 2004 he was Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems and in 2005 he was appointed Emeritus Editor in Chief.  He is also a Fellow of the European AI Association (ECCAI).