Friday Lunchtime Lecture: Sir Nigel Shadbolt - What's the future of open data?

AI Expert Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt will be asking whether the open data movement has succeeded and what the next steps should be to secure its foundation for our economies and societies We have seen many achievements in open data, by governments and NGOs, large corporates and startups, collectives and individuals. This talk will reflect on and review some of these achievements and look to the future, asking questions like ‘How does open data relate to data that is closed or shared?’ and ‘Does open data help us empower individuals?’ About the speaker Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is Chairman and Co-Founder of the Open Data Institute. He is also Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Head of the Web and Internet Science Group, Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. With over 400 publications he has researched on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. He was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science and is a Director of the Web Science Trust which seeks to advance our understanding of the Web and promote the Web’s positive impact on society. In 2009 the Prime Minister appointed him and Sir Tim Berners-Lee as Information Advisors to transform access to Public Sector Information. This work led to the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk site that now provides a portal to over 9,000 datasets. In May 2010 he was asked by the UK Coalition Government to join the Public Sector Transparency Board – this oversees Open Data releases across the public sector. In April 2011 he became Chair of the UK Government’s midata programme – whose goal is to empower consumers by releasing their data back to them. In the November 2011 Autumn statement he was awarded £10M funding via the Technology Strategy Board to set up the Open Data Institute with Sir Tim Berners-Lee.