The Digital Hub Annual Lecture 2026 with Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt

Join us for the third annual Digital Hub Lecture, which this year will be given by Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt in his last public lecture as Principal of Jesus College.

In 'Silicone Spires: Oxford in the Age of AI', Sir Nigel will discuss emerging themes in the application, ethics and governance of artificial intelligence, with a specific focus on the Oxford ecosystem.

Sir Nigel is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence and one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science. He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and Professor of Computing Science at Oxford University. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’. With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. In May 2024 he published ‘As If Human’, which provides a new approach to the challenges surrounding AI. In 2025 he was appointed to the Council for Science and Technology, which advises the Prime Minister and Cabinet on strategic science and technology policy issues. Most recently he was asked to lead the setting up of the Oxford Institute of Ethics in AI and, in November 2025, was appointed as Chair of AI@Oxford Research. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.