Artificial intelligence (AI) has a decades-long history that exhibits alternating enthusiasm and disillusionment for the field’s scientific insights, technical accomplishments, and socioeconomic impact.
Recent achievements and deployments have seen renewed claims for the transformative and disruptive effects of AI. However, there is growing concern about how we regulate and govern AI systems, and how we ensure that such systems align with human values and ethics, how we live alongside these new products of our technical ingenuity.
Through this session, moderated by Vibhaa Sreedharan and Yaqin Zhang, Sir Nigel Shadbolt will review the history and current state of the art in AI, and consider how we address the challenges and opportunities that current and imminent AI systems present.
Bio
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI). He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 2009 he was appointed Information Advisor by the UK Prime Minister and, working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, oversaw Open Data releases across the public sector. He was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’.
Sir Nigel has been working in AI for over four decades, having obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh’s Department of Artificial Intelligence in 1984. His first tenured faculty position was in the Department of Psychology at the University of Nottingham where he established and led its first AI group. He moved to Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science in 2000. At Southampton he researched the next generation of the World Wide Web and was the first Head of the Web and Internet Science Group. At Oxford he has focused his research on human centred AI in a wide range of applications. Most recently he was asked to lead the setting up of the Oxford Institute of Ethics in AI. He spent the first part of 2024 as the Donald Gordon Fellow at STIAS (Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies)
With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. In 2018 he published The Digital Ape: how to live (in peace) with smart machines, described as a ‘landmark book’. May 2024 saw the publication of his latest book As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence by Yale University Press.
He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the British Computer Society.