Jonathan Shock

Background

About Jonathan Shock

I am leading an Initiative to set up the University of Cape Town AI Institute. This Institute will have applied AI research focuses on Health and Wellbeing, Climate and the Environment, and Poverty and Inequality, using AI to catalyse world-class research underway in these areas at the University. It will also have a strong focus on foundational AI and AI safety. Each of these areas will be tackled through the lenses of Governance, Ethics and Justice, lenses which are historically exceptionally strong in the University's research space. Together with these research and governance directions, we will be upskilling students and staff in responsible use of the latest AI technologies, providing a strong core of African change-makers to be able to leverage novel capabilities in ways that can benefit society broadly across the continent. Finally, we will seek opportunities for knowledge translation, where research can be transformed into beneficial products and services for the wider community. I am a physicist-by-training, working across a number of disciplines including AI, neuroscience and theoretical physics. I undertook my PhD at the University of Southampton before moving to Beijing for my first postdoctoral position at the Institute for Theoretical Physics. From Beijing I moved to Spain with a Juan de la Cierva fellowship at the university of Santiago de Compostela, one of Europe's top string theory departments. There I was able to expand my pure academic skills whilst building experience in the area of the public dissemination of science. I completed a two year Marie Curie fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich. I am now an associate professor in the Department of Maths and Applied Maths at the University of Cape Town and an adjunct professor at the INRS Montreal. I am also now the Interim Director of the UCT AI Initiative and will be working towards building this into an Institute over the coming year. I have a wide array of research interests and spend a lot of my time supervising students.