Professor Ian Roberts is the Director of the project Giving Voice to Digital Democracies: The Social Impact of Artificially Intelligent Communications Technology, funded by the Humanities and Social Change International Foundation.
Ian was educated at the University of Wales and the University of Southern California. After teaching at the University of Geneva, the University of Wales, and the University of Stuttgart, he took up his current post as Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge in 2000. His research focuses on the application of current syntactic theory to the comparative and historical syntax of the Romance, Germanic, and Celtic languages. He works within the research framework argued for by Noam Chomsky, which assumes that there exists a specific human cognitive capacity for language which is present at birth and requires simple environmental stimulation in order for linguistic competence in the mother tongue to develop during the early years of life.
