Director of Risk Information Management Research Group
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Queen Mary University of London
London E1 4NS.
n.fenton at qmul.ac.uk

twitter: @profnfenton

Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2924-0510

Researchgate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Norman_Fenton

wikipedia

http://probabilityandlaw.blogspot.com/
Tel +44 20 7882 7860

Norman Fenton is Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary London University and is also a Director of Agena, a company that specialises in risk management for critical systems.  Norman is a mathematician by training who now works on quantitative risk assessment. This typically involves analysing and predicting the probabilities of unknown events using Bayesian statistical methods including especially causal, probabilistic models (Bayesian networks). This type of reasoning enables improved assessment by taking account of both statistical data and also expert judgment.  In April 2014 Norman was awarded one of the prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grants (BAYES-KNOWLEDGE) to focus on these issues. Norman's experience in risk assessment covers a wide range of application domains such as legal reasoning (he has been an expert witness in major criminal and civil cases), medical analytics, vehicle reliability, embedded software, transport systems, financial services, and football prediction. Norman has a special interest in raising public awareness of the importance of probability theory and Bayesian reasoning in everyday life (including how to present such reasoning in simple lay terms) and he maintains a  website dedicated to this and also a blog focusing on probability and the law.  In March 2015 Norman presented the award-winning BBC documentary Climate Change by Numbers. Since  2017 Norman had been leading the EPRSC Digital Health Technologies Project PAMBAYESIAN and the Leverhulme Trust project CAUSAL-DYNAMICS. In July 2018 he was appointed as a Turing Fellow. 

Norman has published 7 books and over 240 referred articles and has provided consulting to many major companies world-wide. His 2012 book was the first to bring Bayesian networks to a general audience (the second edition is due out summer 2018). Norman's current projects are focused on using Bayesian methods for improved legal reasoning and improved medical decision making. Since June 2011 he has led an international consortium (Bayes and the Law) of statisticians, lawyers and forensic scientists working to improve the use of statistics in court. In 2016 he led  a prestigious 6-month Programme on Probability and Statistics in Forensic Science at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, University of Cambridge.  In addition to his research on risk assessment, Norman is  renowned  for his work in software engineering (including pioneering work on software metrics); the third edition of his book “Software Metrics: A Rigorous and  Practical  Approach” was published in November 2014. 

Norman has held previous academic posts at City University (Professor in the Centre for Software Reliability), South Bank (Director of Centre for Systems and Software Engineering), Oxford University Maths Institute and Wolfson College Oxford (Post Doctoral Research Fellow), University College Dublin (Research Fellow) and was a visiting researcher at GMD in Germany. In 2016 he was a Simons Fellow (2016) at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge. He is an Affiliated Professor to the University of Haifa, Israel. Norman is  a Chartered Engineer, a Chartered Mathematician and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society.

Norman introduces Bayes (2 minute video). More videos here.