Axiome Partners

People

Axiome Partners is a digital insurance start up, founded in 2020 by John Cummins and Alastair Burns.

  • John Cummins

    Co-Founder

    John Cummins

    Co-Founder

    With a strong science and technology background and for over two decades, John Cummins has led a diverse range of innovative initiatives in collaboration with universities and companies. In recent years, he co-founded the Legal Technology Laboratory in the US to bring lawyers and computer scientists together on cutting-edge legal tech projects. Most recently, and in collaboration with UCL and a range of other organisations, John has undertaken pioneering work in the area of next-generation, digital contracting, also becoming known as ‘computable contracting’. John has a wealth of experience in computational modelling and information science, much of which was gained through his direct involvement in R&D projects, mainly in the fields of engineering science and manufacturing automation.

  • Alastair Burns

    Co-Founder

    Alastair Burns

    Co-Founder

    With over thirty years’ experience in the US, European and London insurance market, holding roles across the insurance value chain, Alastair has led business and functions that have served Global brands through to individual consumers. His interest in technology and associated data issues have been ever present, from the early EPS eTrading efforts of the London market, through to the design of context aware travel insurance products for the mobile telephone companies. His most recent role drew him into the detail of the Future at Lloyd’s, and with it a new understanding of what will really be required for the insurance market place to achieve its goals of true client centricity at a sustainably acceptable cost base.

  • Ari Nordström

    Axiome Associate

    Ari Nordström

    Axiome Associate

    Ari Nordström is an independent information architect specialising in markup and XML technologies. He has provided his services to many organisations and companies across a number of borders over the years, some of which deliver the rule of law, help dairy farmers make a living, and assist in servicing commercial aircraft. He is a frequent speaker at markup conferences in Europe and overseas, and is one of the founding organisers of Markup UK. He has also contributed to markup and information technology standards.

    Ari is the proud owner and head projectionist of Western Sweden’s last functioning 35/70mm cinema, situated in his garage, which should explain why he once wrote a paper on automating commercial cinemas using XML.

  • Andrew Sales

    Axiome Associate

    Andrew Sales

    Axiome Associate

    Andrew has worked successfully with and for publishers – both traditional and “accidental” – on their single-source publishing workflows for over twenty-five years.

    Clients have included Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, LexisNexis, The Royal Pharmaceutical Society, Wiley, the House of Commons and the British Standards Institution.

    He chairs BSI Technical Committee IST/41 (Document Description and Processing Languages) and leads the UK delegation at international standards meetings in this space.

    He is the editor of the ISO standard for XML quality assurance (Schematron) and convenes the Working Group which develops it.

    Andrew is a regular contributor to, peer reviewer for, and occasional invited speaker at conferences about publishing technology and co-founded the Markup UK conference in 2018.

  • Jacinto Dávila

    Axiome Associate

    Jacinto Dávila

    Axiome Associate

    Jacinto is a computational logician with over 30 years of experience as a developer and researcher in logic and artificial intelligence. As a tenured professor at the Universidad de Los Andes, he led the creation of a graduate program in modeling and simulation as well as a distance education system in computing. More recently, he has been working on developing a controlled form of natural language for computer applications. He believes that some restricted form of natural language will be the ultimate computer programming language. He has developed a translator for Logical English, which is one of the more advanced experiments in translation into computer languages like Prolog, LPS and ASP. It has been used for applications such as digital contracts (or logical contracts) for blockchains, law, education and the insurance industry.

  • Bob Kowalski

    Axiome Associate

    Bob Kowalski

    Axiome Associate

    Bob is a notable figure in the field of computer science, and is well known for his work in the field of logic programming, and as the co-inventor of the Prolog programming language. He is also one of the main architects of Logical English, a high-level, logic programming language, written in English as a controlled natural language. He argues that the use of computational logic can help to improve natural language communication and problem solving skills. In the course of an illustrious career, Bob has won many awards, including, in 2021, the Inaugural CodeX Prize for his work on the application of logic programming to the formalisation and analysis of the British Nationality Act. Bob is a Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Imperial College London.

  • Ed Cummins

    Axiome Associate

    Ed Cummins

    Axiome Associate

    Eduard supports Axiome in a number of ways, not least of which is his responsibility for managing and updating the Axiome website and IT infrastructure. Ed is a Maths and Economics graduate from the University of Bath and is mainly involved in prototyping work to help build Axiome’s thought leadership and intellectual property. To date, most of Ed’s time has been spent on establishing a VPS-based, XML authoring capability using Oxygen’s Content Fusion for XML objects stored in a GitHub repository. Ed has more recently started to investigate various approaches for the modification and configuration of XML objects using Python code. In conjunction with his degree, Ed is looking to apply economic models to understand the potential impact of product disaggregation in the commercial insurance space.

  • Dickie Whitaker

    Advisor

    Dickie Whitaker

    Advisor

    Dickie Whitaker has 40 years’ experience in the (re)insurance business and for the last 20 years has specialised in risk and innovation, linking academia, government and finance. He co-founded the Lighthill Risk Network, Oasis Palm Tree ltd, the Oasis Hub and is the Chief Executive of Oasis Loss Satellite Applications Advisory Board, Expert Group for the Global Risk Assessment Framework (GRAF), UNISDR, Cabot Institute Advisory Board, Natural Environment Research Council and others. Dickie supported and steered the computable contracts project funded by the Lighthill Risk Network that served as the genesis for Axiome Partners.

  • Oliver Goodenough

    Advisor

    Oliver Goodenough

    Advisor

    Oliver Goodenough’s research and practice at the intersection of law, science, technology, and finance make him an international authority on legal innovation. On the academic side, he is a Research Professor of Law at Vermont Law School and affiliated faculty at Stanford’s CodeX Center for Legal Informatics, where he has been a leader in their initiatives on computational law, computable contracting and insurance contract automation. For CodeX, he has been a principal author of Computable Contracts and Insurance: An Introduction and Developing a Legal Specification Protocol: Technological Considerations and Requirements. He is also a Research Fellow of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research and an Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering.