Professor of Computer Science
Head of RADAR (Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis) Group
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Queen Mary University of London
London E1 4NS.
norman@dcs.qmul.ac.uk
Tel +44 20 7882 7860

Norman Fenton is Professor of Computer Science at Queen Mary  (London University) and is also Chief Executive Officer of Agena, a company that specialises in risk management for critical systems.  At Queen Mary he is  the Director of the Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis Research Group (RADAR). Norman is renowned for his work on quantitative risk assessment, which typically involves analysing and predicting the probabilities of unknown events using Bayesian statistical methods including especially causal, probabilistic models. This type of reasoning enables improved assessment by taking account of both statistical data and also expert judgment.  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 trials, vehicle reliability, embedded software, transport systems, and financial services. 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. Norman has published 6 books and over 100 referred articles and has provided consulting to many major companies world-wide. He is currently leading the Government funded DIADEM project, which is a consortium of medical practitioners and researchers, mathematicians and computer scientists, investigating how improved data-analysis can transform healthcare in the UK. In addition to his research on risk assessment, Norman is  renowned  for his work in software engineering (including pioneering work on software metrics) ; his book “Software Metrics: A Practical and Rigorous Approach” has sold over 35,000 copies worldwide.  

Norman is an Affiliated Professor to the University of Haifa, Israel. He has held previous academic posts at City University (Professor in Centre for Software Reliability), South Bank (Director of Centre for Systems and Software Engineering), Oxford University and University College Dublin (both as Research Fellow) and was a visiting researcher at GMD in Germany. Norman is  a Chartered Engineer, a Chartered Mathematician and is a Fellow of the British Computer Society. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Software Quality Journal. Norman is married to Naomi and has two daughters Nicole and Hannah.