James was appointed by President Obama as Vice Chair of the Global Development Council at the White House (2012-2016). Appointments by US Commerce Secretaries include Digital Economy Board of Advisors, National Innovation Advisory Board as part of the COMPETES ACT. He is on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations, Aspen Institute, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Markle Foundation. He is on the advisory boards of Stanford’s 100 Year Study on AI, Oxford Internet Institute, MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, UC Berkeley’s school of Information, Harvard’s Hutchins Center, including the WEB Du Bois Institute for African and African-American Research. James is a non-resident Senior Fellow of Brookings Institution, and a member of the World Economic Forum Council on AI and Robotics.
James was on the Engineering Faculty at Oxford University and a member of the Programing Research Group, the Robotics Research Lab, a Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, a visiting scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a faculty exchange fellow at MIT. A Rhodes Scholar, James holds DPhil. MSc. MA. from Oxford in Robotics, Mathematics and Computer Science, a BSc in Electrical Engineering from University of Zimbabwe.