Justin O'Brien
About
Psychologist, academic and AI consultant. My work now sits where artificial intelligence meets the everyday machinery of a university: assessment, academic integrity and institutional governance.
My PhD research examined human visual perception, and I have spent more than three decades in academic research and teaching at London universities. My subsequent research encompassed social cognition, neuroimaging and computational methods — work that was, throughout, about the same underlying question: how you establish that a measurement is actually measuring what you claim it measures.
That question turns out to be the useful one to bring to artificial intelligence in higher education. I now work on the responsible use of AI in universities, particularly in assessment, academic integrity and institutional governance, with a wider interest in the gap between technological promise and institutional reality.
How the two halves connect
Universities are being sold artificial intelligence at speed, largely by people who have never sat on an exam board, drafted a condition of registration response, or chaired an academic misconduct panel. The pitches are frequently plausible and occasionally excellent. What they tend to lack is any account of how the thing survives contact with a real institution — its regulations, its data protection obligations, its committee cycle, its budget, and a regulator with statutory powers.
Two decades of designing experiments is unexpectedly good preparation for that. An assessment is a measurement instrument. An integrity process is an inference from evidence to a conclusion about a person, with consequences attached. A procurement decision is a claim about what a system will do, which is testable. In each case the discipline is the same: state what you are claiming, state what would show the claim to be false, and check.
Higher education finance
In March 2026 I published The 2026 Reckoning, an independent analysis of the finances of 150 UK universities. Released as a free report, it has been downloaded more than 8,000 times and prompted extensive discussion within the sector.
Regulated to Fail develops that investigation. It asks a larger question: how did a university system containing so much expertise, evidence and institutional experience arrive at a position in which so many of its institutions have so few good choices left?
This matters for the AI work more than it might appear. Any advice about technology in higher education that ignores the sector’s finances is advice for a sector that does not exist. Institutions are not choosing between a good option and a better one; many are choosing between constrained options under real financial pressure. Recommendations have to be affordable and implementable, or they are decoration.
Background
- PhD in psychology; research on human visual perception, face and expression processing, and social cognition.
- More than three decades of academic research and teaching at London universities, latterly as a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Brunel University London.
- Research methods spanning behavioural experiment, neuroimaging (fMRI and EEG) and computational analysis.
- Independent analysis of UK higher education finance, regulation and policy since 2025.
Contact
Email justin@obrien.vision. Further detail on advisory work is on the advisory page, and enquiry routes are on the contact page.