Professor Nick Jennings

CB FREng FRS

  • Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University

Professor Jennings is Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University. He is also the Vice-President for Fellowship Engagement at the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was previously the Vice-Provost for Research and Enterprise at Imperial College London, the UK Government’s first Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security, and Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.

Profile

Professor Nick Jennings is an internationally-recognised authority in the areas of AI, autonomous systems, cyber-security and agent-based computing.

His research focuses on developing AI systems for large-scale, open and dynamic environments. In particular, he is interested in how to endow individual autonomous agents with the ability to act and interact in flexible ways and with effectively engineering systems that contain both humans and software agents. He is passionate about the real-world impact of research and his systems have been deployed to save lives in the aftermath of disasters, to win Olympic medals for TeamGB, and to monitor the impact of climate change on glaciers. He has also been involved with a number of start-ups including Aerogility, Darktrace, Sentient Sports, Reliance Cyber Systems and is a board member of Midlands Mindforge and a board advisor to Leicestershire County Cricket Club.

In undertaking this research, he has attracted grant income of £33M, published over 700 articles (with 500 co-authors) and graduated 55 PhD students (including two winners and one runner-up of the BCS/CPHC Distinguished Dissertation Award). With over 100,000 citations, he is one of the world's most cited computer scientists. He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems and a founding director of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

Nick was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in the Queen’s New Year Honours List in 2016 for his services to computer science and national security science. He has received a number of prestigious awards for his research including the Computers and Thought Award, the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award, and the Lovelace Medal. He is a judge for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and was chair of the judges for the inaugural Manchester Prize in AI.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the British Computer Society, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB), the Royal Society of the Arts, the City and Guilds of London Institute, the German AI Institute (DFKI) and the European Artificial Intelligence Association and a member of Academia Europaea.