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Michael Wooldridge

Personal photo - Michael Wooldridge

Professor Michael Wooldridge

Professor of Computer Science

Senior Research Fellow, Hertford College

E: michael.wooldridge@cs.ox.ac.uk

Interests

My research area is Artificial Intelligence (AI), and within that field, I have worked extensively on multi-agent systems: systems composed of multiple interacting AI systems. I have published more than four hundred and fifty articles -- see also my Google Scholar profile

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Biography

You can download a short and long biography along with links to a photo here.

I am the Ashall Professor of the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, and a Senior Research Fellow at Hertford College. From 2014-21 I was Head of Department of Computer Science. I joined Oxford on 1 June 2012; before this I was for twelve years a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool.

In 2020, I was awarded the Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society; in 2006, I was the recipient of the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award; in 2021 I received the AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator Award; and in 2023 I received the Distinguished Service Award from the European Assocation for AI.

I am an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, a EURAI Fellow, an AISB Fellow, a BCS Fellow, and a member of Academia Europaea.

I served as President of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) from 2015-17, President of the European Association for AI (EurAI) from 2014-16, and President of the International Association for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) from 2007-09.

I was general chair for the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on AI (AAAI-24), held in Vancouver, BC, in February 2024, Conference Chair for the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2015), held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in July 2015, program chair for the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2010), held in Lisbon, Portugal, in August 2010, program chair for the  Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2005), held in Utrecht, the Netherlands, in 2005, General Chair for the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2003), held in Melbourne, Australia, in July 2003, and Program Chair for the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents-98), held in Minneapolis in May 1998.

In 2021 I received a Turing AI World Leading Researcher Fellowship from UKRI; in 2011, I was awarded a 5-year ERC Advanced Grant, entitled "Reasoning About Computational Economies" (RACE); and in 1997, I founded AgentLink, the EC-funded European Network of Excellence in the area of agent-based computing. 

I am co-Editor-in-Chief of Artificial Intelligence Journal, the oldest international journal for AI (established 1971), and indeed one of the oldest computing journals. Between 2003 and 2009 I was co-editor-in-chief of the Journal Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. I have served as an associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) (2006-2009, 2009-2012), an associate editor of Artificial Intelligence journal (2009-2012) and I currently serve on the editorial boards of the Journal of Applied Logic, Journal of Logic and Computation, Journal of Applied Artificial Intelligence, Games, and Computational Intelligence

I gave the 2023 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, in the 198th year of the series, broadcast by BBC TV over Christmas 2023. I have written two popular science introductions to AI: the Ladybird Expert Guide to Artificial Intelligence, a short overview in the iconic British book series, and The Road to Conscious Machines, a longer introduction to AI in Penguin's classic Pelican series; an edited and revised version of The Road to Conscious Machines was published in the USA by Flatiron Press under the title A Brief History of AI. Both books are aimed a general audience.

See also

Activities

Projects

Current Students

Past Students

Josef Bolt
James Fox
Dongge Han
James Paulin
Thomas Steeples
Mateusz Tarkowski

Past Researchers

Javier Morales
Hao Zhou