Michael Wooldridge

Michael Wooldridge is the Ashall Professor of the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oxford. An AI researcher for more than 35 years, he has published over 500 scientific articles on the subject, along with 10 books, translated into 9 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), the Association for Computing Machinery (FACM), the Association for the Advancement of AI (FAAAI), and the European Association for AI (FEurAI), as well as a Member of Academia Europaea (MAE). He is currently President-Elect of the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI) and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Artificial Intelligence.

He previously served as President of the European Association for AI (2014–16) and President of the International Joint Conference on AI (2015–17). His honours include the Royal Society's Faraday Prize (2025), the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal (2020), the Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award from the Association for the Advancement of AI (2021), ACM's Autonomous Agents Research Award (2006), and the Distinguished Service Award from the European Association for AI (2023). In 2023, he was appointed specialist adviser to the House of Lords inquiry on Large Language Models.

Wooldridge has written two popular introductions to AI: the Ladybird Expert Guide to AI (2018) and The Road to Conscious Machines (2020). In December 2023, he presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, broadcast by BBC TV in the 198th year of the series.