Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deputy Head (Research) of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He was a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative, a joint endeavour between the University of Southampton and MIT, and is a Director and Trustee of the Web Science Trust.  He is also a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation.

He has recently been given a special role by the Prime Minister to help transform public access to Government information.  He will be working closely with Sir Tim Berners-Lee to open up public access to non-personal public data, including overseeing the creation of a single online point of access for public UK datasets.

In its 50^th 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.

Between 2000-07, 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.  In 2009 he was awarded a further £2m by the EPSRC to build on this work.

He has been involved in a wide range of entrepreneurial activities. In 2006 he was one of three founding Directors of Garlik Ltd, a company specialising in consumer products and services to put people and their families in control of their own digital information.   He is currently Garlik’s Chief Scientific Officer. 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 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 is a series consultant to the BBC’s landmark documentary series The Digital Revolution.