John Rust

Biography

John Rust is a psychometrician with a special interest in how machines learn human psychology.  He graduated from London University in psychology in 1970, received his PhD in 1974 and MA in Philosophy in 1976. He became Lecturer and Reader in Psychometrics at London until his appointment as Professor of Psychometrics at City University, London, in 2002. John was founding editor of the journal Philosophical Psychology in 1985 and his textbook ‘Modern Psychometrics’ is now in its 3rd edition. From the 1990s he worked with the Psychological Corporation to develop tests of intelligence, including the Wechsler and British Ability scales.

John moved to the University of Cambridge in 2005 and was Director of its Psychometrics Centre until 2019. From 2008 until 2014 the centre published widely on the application of psychometric methodology to the analysis of online digital footprints, both reporting benefits and warning of risks. He believes in the emergence of a new branch of psychology fit for the digital age, one in which researchers can interrogate interactions not only between humans but between humans and bots, algorithms or other agents that exhibit unique but often covert moral and social characteristics of their own.