John Cummins

With a strong science and technology background, John Cummins has led a diverse range of collaborative research and development initiatives with universities and companies for well over two decades. Much of this work has been in the fields of computational modelling and information science.

In recent years, John has become increasingly engaged in the ‘legal technology’ space. From 2014 to 2016, he led a pan-European project to provide high-tech start-ups with rapid access to legal advice. He then went on to co-found the Legal Technology Laboratory (www.thelegaltechlab.com) in the US to bring lawyers and computer scientists together on cutting-edge legal tech projects including: automated document creation (using the Neota Logic platform); legal ontology development (using schema.org); the conceptual development of computable contracts (with Prof. Oliver Goodenough); and a data analytics project for policy development (using the Alteryx platform).

As an Honorary Research Fellow of UCL’s Computer Science Department (Financial Computing and Analytics Group), John has pioneered the further development of computable contracting. This has led to a number of new activities for smart and computable contracting in association with the Centre for Blockchain Technologies.

In 2019 and 2020, and with funding from the Lighthill Risk Network in London, John led an industry research project on ‘Automating (Re)insurance through Computable Contracting’. This project involved collaborating with a number of key players in the London insurance market to explore the application of computable contracting approaches for commercial (re)insurance. Based on the success of this work, John subsequently co-founded Axiome Partners to turn computable contracting into a reality for the insurance industry.

He holds a Masters Degree in Engineering from Brunel University in London, UK, and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft in Stuttgart, Germany. John is also completely fluent in three languages (English, German and Spanish), and can embarrass himself in several others!

Related Sessions

Computable Contracts 2021 Location: Date: April 8, 2021 Time: 9:50 am - 10:50 am View session

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