About
I am an expert in Artificial Intelligence with a 30-year publication track record in core AI and Data Science venues. Throughout my career, my research has been strongly interdisciplinary and informed by practical problems where innovations in core AI methods may have significant impact. The first EPSRC award I received, for example, enabled a colleague and me to organise the Symposium on Argument and Computation held in Pitlochry, Perthshire in July 2000. This week-long event involved experts from across the world in computer science, law, linguistics, philosophy, and classics with interests in argumentation. This was the first time that these disparate disciplines were brought together, and the event and resulting publication (Reed & Norman (2003), “Argumentation Machines”, Springer) helped forge a new interdisciplinary area of research.
I have held at least one externally funded research grant or contract each year since 1999 with total actual (non FeC) funding approx. £27M awarded to the institution at which I was working at the time. Highlights include: PI of the DoD/MoD funded Network and Information Sciences International Technology Alliance (NIS ITA) (£2.9M), a programme highlighted by the Obama Whitehouse in a press release; the UKRI dot.rual Digital Economy Research Hub (£11.8M) (three Hubs funded in the UK) as one of a core cross-disciplinary team of four initiating and leading the project; and PI of the UKRI MINDS Centre for Doctoral Training (£5.82M) one of 16 interdisciplinary centres for research training in Artificial Intelligence established as part of UK strategy.
In addition to leading underpinning research, I have led work to develop non-academic impact. The Collaborative Intelligence Spaces (CISpaces) toolkit, which was developed and evaluated with professional analysts in the US and UK (see Toniolo et al. (2023) “Human-machine collaboration in intelligence analysis: An expert evaluation”) has influenced the development of the UK Single Intelligence Environment, the UK’s initiative to enable better decision making across Government. The same thread of research is continuing to have impact, again through interdisciplinary collaboration, but with experts in politics at Southampton, local and regional government, and charities in the development of democratic innovations.