Professor Nigel Shadbolt

Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
Email: nrs@ecs.soton.ac.uk
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Professor Shadbolt’s research concentrates on two ends of the spectrum of AI - namely, Knowledge Technologies and Bio-robotics. For fifteen years as Director of the AI Group at the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham he established an international reputation for work in Knowledge Technologies. In particular developing methods, tools and techniques to support the construction of knowledge-based systems. Much of this work was undertaken collaboratively and in many cases led to deployed applications. In 2000 he led a consortium of five Universities that secured an EPSRC Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Advanced Knowledge Technologies. Professor Shadbolt is the Director of this twelve million dollar, six-year research programme that is pursuing basic and applied research in the provision of technologies to support Knowledge Management and realise the promise of the Semantic Web. The AKT project has attracted additional funding including two grants for which Professor Shadbolt was the named Principal Investigator. The first of these is investigating the use of knowledge technologies in a collaborative context using multicast videoconference technologies such as the Access Grid. The second (MIAKT) is attempting to support medical decision-making through the use of AKT’s tools, methods and techniques. He is also an investigator on a University of Southampton e-Science project GEODISE where is directing the effort to integrate knowledge engineering methods into design optimisation tasks that exploit Grid computing. He is also working with his colleague Professor Nick Jennings on a Hewlett-Packard sponsored project ANNA that aims to develop a framework within which to software agents knowledge acquisition capabilities.

His work on bio-robotics investigates how we can draw inspiration from real animal systems in the construction of robots and biologically inspired neural modelling. Research work has included investigations into simple sensory systems for mobile robots and hybrid architectures for autonomous robot systems. He works with Dr Terry Elliott on the development of computational models of neural plasticity that reflect the dynamic nature of anatomical change in the nervous system. This work is also now being applied to robots to understand how we might build developing artificial nervous systems and fault tolerant machines.

Professor Shadbolt has published some 150 articles on various facets of AI, and has written and co-edited four books. Since 1985, Professor Shadbolt, has singly or jointly, secured and directed 26 research grants worth over £15,500,000.

He is Editor in Chief of IEEE Intelligent Systems, an Associate Editor of the International Journal for Human Computer Systems and on the editorial board of the Knowledge Engineering Review. Professor Shadbolt has been an invited lecturer at numerous national and international conferences; he has been programme and technical chairman of a number of conferences and workshops. He is a member of various national committees including; the Human Sciences and Technology Sub-Committee of the UK Defence Scientific Advisory Committee (DSAC), the UK e-Science Technical Advisory Committee (TAG), the BCS Distinguished Dissertation Committee, and the BCS Knowledge Services Board.

In 1992 Professor Shadbolt co-founded Epistemics Ltd a company specialising in Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management. He has acted as a consultant to a wide range of companies and organisations and since 1983 he has been an Associate with Cambridge Consultants.