Trained as a roboticist, while at Oxford Manyika studied computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and topics such as Bayesian networks and decentralized data fusion. He and Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte published the book Decentralized Data Fusion: An Information Theoretic Approach in 1994. Early in his career, Manyika was awarded a research fellowship at Oxford's Balliol College and served on the engineering faculty at Oxford. During that time he was also a faculty exchange fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting scientist at NASA Jet Propulsion Labs in California.
