The International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP) has selected Dr. Emily Sullivan for the 2025 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy, which specifically recognizes scholars at an early stage of their academic career whose research is likely to reshape debates at the nexus of Computing and Philosophy.
Sullivan is an Associate Professor in the Theoretical Philosophy group at Utrecht University. Her research explores the ways that AI technology mediates knowledge, understanding, and our practice of giving and receiving explanations. Her work focuses on the way that AI changes how we do science, which calls us to rethink existing philosophical frameworks surrounding the nature of explanation, idealization, and scientific understanding. At the same time, she considers how normative issues in ethics and epistemology shape the answers to these questions. Currently she is the PI on an ERC starting grant for the project Machine Learning in Science and Society: A dangerous toy? (2025-2030). The project’s aim is to conceptualize machine learning models across science and society as a type of toy model and develop a theory for evaluating model idealizations, and importantly how idealizations might fail. In this project, she bridges epistemic and ethical issues in simple computational models with complex modern day machine learning models.
Sullivan received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College studying Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and a PhD in Philosophy from Fordham University (2016). Before joining Utrecht University, Sullivan held postdocs at TU Delft in the Philosophy and Ethics of Technology group and the Web Information Systems group in Computer Science, and she was an Assistant Professor at TU Eindhoven, where she co-founded the Eindhoven Center for Philosophy of AI. In the fall of 2025, she will join the University of Edinburgh in the Philosophy Department and Edinburgh Futures Institute as a Senior Lecturer. There she will be a co-director of the Centre for Technomoral Futures.
The board recognizes Dr. Sullivan’s significant contributions to the epistemology of machine learning and to our understanding of trust, reliability, explanation, and other issues in our computer-mediated world. We eagerly anticipate the future impact of her scholarship on these and other topics.
Dr. Sullivan will present the Simon Award Keynote Address at IACAP-AISB 2025 conference at University of Twente, The Netherlands, 1-3 July. For more information see https://iacapconf.org/
Please join us at IACAP-AISB 2025 to congratulate Dr. Sullivan on this well-deserved award.