Education
Bio
Michael Wooldridge is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Hertford College, and special advisor at the Alan Turing Institute, London. He served as Head of Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford from 2014-21 (sabbatical 2018). Before joining Oxford in 2012, he was for 12 years a Professor at the University of Liverpool, where he was Head of Department of Computer Science (2001-05), and then Head of School (= Dean) of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Computer Science (2007-2011). Wooldridge gained his PhD from the University of Manchester in 1992. Since then, he has published more than 450 scientific articles on AI and related topics, including nine books, which have been translated into seven different languages. His works have attracted more than 84,000 citations (h-index 102) as of May 2024.
Wooldridge has received international awards for research, education, and scientific leadership. In 2020 he received the Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society (the UK’s top award for a computer scientist); he received the ACM Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2006, the Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award from the Association for Advancement of AI (AAAI) in 2021, and the European Association for AI Distinguished Service Award in 2023. He is an ACM Fellow (2015), a AAAI Fellow (2008), a Fellow of the European Association for AI (2007), and a member of Academia Europaea (2015). In 2021 he received a 5-year Turing AI World Leading Researcher Fellowship from UKRI; in 2011, he was awarded a 5-year ERC Advanced Grant.
Wooldridge was President of the European Association for AI (EurAI) from 2014-16, President of the International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI) from 2015-17, and President of the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (IFAAMAS) from 2007-09. He was general chair for the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on AI (AAAI-24, Vancouver, BC), Conference Chair for the 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2015, Buenos Aires, Argentina), program chair for the 19th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-2010, Lisbon, Portugal), program chair for the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2005, Utrecht, the Netherlands), general chair for the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-2003, Melbourne, Australia), and program chair for the Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents (Agents-98, Minneapolis MN). He is currently co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Artificial Intelligence ¬– the leading international academic journal for AI (established 1971).
Wooldridge has given evidence to multiple government committees, including the House of Lords Select Committee on AI, the Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee, and the Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology. In 2023 he was appointed Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords inquiry on Large Language Models and Generative AI.
Wooldridge has published two popular science introductions to AI: the Ladybird Expert Guide to AI (2018), and The Road to Conscious Machines (2020). He gives frequent public lectures on AI (e.g., Hay Festival, Cheltenham Literary Festival, Oxford Literary Festival, Hendon Literary Festival, Stratford Literary Festival), and in 2023 was selected to give the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, in the 198th year of the series, broadcast by BBC TV in December of that year. Wooldridge’s life and work were profiled in the 300th edition of the BBC Radio 4 program “The Life Scientific”.
