PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Oiwi Parker Jones

Also known as ʻŌiwi Parker Jones

Oiwi Parker Jones is an Oxford researcher who applies machine learning to neural data and speech decoding to develop brain-computer interfaces. He grew up speaking Hawaiian and completed an Oxford DPhil on Hawaiian computational phonology and morphology in 2010. With Brendan Shillingford, he coauthored a 2018 paper that presents a finite-state approach and a hybrid neural method for restoring missing characters in older Hawaiian writing. PNPL began at Oxford in 2023, and Parker Jones coauthored LibriBrain in 2025, MEG-XL in February 2026, and LibriBrain100 in August 2026. As of October 2026, he leads PNPL and serves as a Principal Investigator at the Oxford Robotics Institute and Hugh Price Fellow in Computer Science at Jesus College; his career also includes postdoctoral training in imaging neuroscience and applied AI and a Medicine lectureship at St Peter's College.

Now at
Oxford Robotics Institute and Jesus College, Oxford

Timeline

  1. 2010

    A DPhil on Hawaiian

    In 2010, he completes an Oxford DPhil on “A Computational Phonology and Morphology of Hawaiian”. He grows up speaking Hawaiian and focuses his doctoral research on natural language processing for low-resource languages.

  2. 2018

    Restoring old Hawaiian characters

    With Brendan Shillingford, he coauthors “Recovering Missing Characters in Old Hawaiian Writing” in 2018. The paper presents an end-to-end finite-state transducer and a hybrid method that combines an FST with a recurrent neural network language model for transliteration.

  3. 2023

    Starting the Neural Processing Lab

    The Parker Jones Neural Processing Lab is established in Oxford's Department of Engineering Science in 2023. It works across neuroscience, machine learning, language and robotics to develop brain-computer interfaces.

  4. June 2025

    LibriBrain for speech decoding

    In June 2025, he coauthors LibriBrain, a speech-decoding dataset with over 50 hours of MEG recordings from one participant. The release includes standard data splits and baselines for speech detection, phoneme classification and word classification.

  5. February 2026

    Pretraining with long MEG contexts

    In February 2026, he coauthors MEG-XL, which uses 2.5 minutes of MEG context per sample. The model matches supervised word-decoding performance with a fraction of training data.

  6. August 2026

    LibriBrain reaches 100 hours

    He coauthors LibriBrain100 in August 2026, expanding the dataset to over 100 hours of MEG recordings of naturalistic speech. Its broad multi-subject set adds about 40 minutes of data from each of 32 participants.

  7. As of October 2026

    Leading PNPL at Oxford

    As of October 2026, he is Group Lead of PNPL, Principal Investigator at the Oxford Robotics Institute and Hugh Price Fellow in Computer Science at Jesus College. His work applies machine learning to brain data and develops practical brain-computer interfaces, alongside speech and language technology for the Hawaiian-speaking community. His degrees include a BA and an Oxford DPhil, and his career includes postdoctoral training in imaging neuroscience at UCL and Oxford and applied AI at ORI, plus a Medicine lecturer role at St Peter's College.

Career

  1. NowUniversity of OxfordGroup Lead, Neural Processing Lab
  2. NowOxford Robotics InstitutePrincipal Investigator
  3. NowJesus College, OxfordHugh Price Fellow in Computer Science
  4. University College LondonPostdoctoral researcher in imaging neuroscience
  5. St Peter's College, OxfordLecturer in Medicine

Education

  1. 2010University of OxfordDPhil

From the biography.

Checked career sources: ori.ox.ac.uk, eng.ox.ac.uk, jesus.ox.ac.uk, neuralprocessinglab.com.

Sources and credits

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  1. Dissertations and Thesis - Hawaiʻi - Hawaiian Language Research - Research Guides at University of Hawaii at Manoa guides.library.manoa.hawaii.edu. Checked 27 October 2026.
  2. Advancing the future of speech prosthetics oxford.shorthandstories.com. Checked 27 October 2026.
  3. Recovering Missing Characters in Old Hawaiian Writing - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  4. PNPL | Parker Jones Neural Processing Lab neuralprocessinglab.com. Checked 27 October 2026.
  5. LibriBrain: Over 50 Hours of Within-Subject MEG to Improve Speech Decoding Methods at Scale arxiv.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  6. MEG-XL: Data-Efficient Brain-to-Text via Long-Context Pre-Training arxiv.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  7. LibriBrain100: One Hundred Hours of Broad and Deep MEG Data for Neural Speech Decoding at Scale arxiv.org. Checked 27 October 2026.
  8. Oxford Robotics Institute | People - Oiwi Parker Jones ori.ox.ac.uk. Checked 27 October 2026.
  9. Oiwi Parker Jones - People - Engineering Science Department eng.ox.ac.uk. Checked 27 October 2026.