Professor Nigel Shadbolt
Founder Partner
is a Professor of AI and Deputy Head of School, Electronics & Computer Science (ECS) at the University of Southampton. He is internationally recognised for his work in AI, Web Science and the Semantic Web. 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. In May 2010 he was appointed to the Public Sector Transparency Board and Chairs the Government’s Local Public Data Panel. 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.
Biography
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.
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.