[8][11][1][12][13][14] Shadbolt was born in London but adopted and raised in the Derbyshire village of Ashford-in-the-Water, living a "bucolic existence" until he went to university.

[4] Shadbolt's research has been in Artificial Intelligence since the late 1970s[1][8][12][16][17][18] working on a broad range of topics; from natural language understanding and robotics[19] through to expert systems, computational neuroscience, memory[20] through to the semantic web[2] and linked data.

One example is the book he co-authored with Kieron O'Hara that examines privacy and trust in the Digital Age – The Spy in the Coffee Machine.

[22] His most recent research is on the topic of social machines – understanding the emergent problem solving that arises from a combination of humans, computers and data at web scale.

The SOCIAM[23] project on social machines is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

The ODI focuses on incubating and nurturing new businesses wanting to harness open data, training and promoting standards.

In 2013, Shadbolt and Tim Berners-Lee joined the board of advisors of tech startup State.com, creating a network of structured opinions on the semantic web.