The 2016 Simon Award: Marcin Milkowski

The Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy recognizes scholars at an early stage of their academic career who are likely to reshape debates at the nexus of Computing and Philosophy by their original research.

It is with great pleasure the IACAP Board announces that Professor Marcin Milkowski has won the 2016 Simon Award for his significant contributions to the foundations of computational cognitive neuroscience.

Professor Milkowski (http://marcinmilkowski.pl/) serves as associate professor in the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is currently a managing editor of Przegląd Filozoficzno-Literacki (Philosophical-Literary Review). From 2005 to 2011, he served on the executive board of the Center for Philosophical Research, a new, independent scientific organisation that includes philosophers and scholars in humanities.

Professor Milkowski wrote his dissertation Konstrukcja umysłu. Intuicje zdrowego rozsądku a naturalizm w filozofii umysłu Daniela Dennetta (“Mind Design. Common-sense intuitions vs. naturalism in Daniel Dennett’s philosophy of mind”) under the supervision of Jacek Hołówka in Institute of Philosophy at Warsaw University. He received habilitation in Poland on the basis of his 2013 Explaining the Computational Mind (MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.). His recent publications include:

  • 2015. Satisfaction conditions in anticipatory mechanisms. Biology & Philosophy, (February).
  • 2015. Function and causal relevance of content. New Ideas in Psychology, 1–9.
  • 2015. Explanatory completeness and idealization in large brain simulations: a mechanistic perspective. Synthese.
  • 2015. Evaluating Artificial Models of Cognition. Studies in Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, 40(1), 43–62.
  • 2014. Social intelligence: how to integrate research? A mechanistic perspective. In A. Herzig & E. Lorini (Eds.), Proceedings of the European Conference on Social Intelligence (ECSI-2014) (pp. 117–127).
  • 2014. Perspektywy ewolucjonistyczne w badaniach społecznych. In M. Gdula & L. M. Nijakowski (Eds.), Oprogramowanie rzeczywistości społecznej (pp. 185–208). Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej.
  • 2014. Is the mind a Turing Machine? How could we tell? In A. Olszewski, B. Brożek, & P. Urbańczyk (Eds.), Church’s Thesis. Logic, Mind, and Nature (pp. 305–333). Kraków: Copernicus Center Press.
  • 2014. Computational Mechanisms and Models of Computation. Philosophia Scientiæ, 18(3), 215–228.
  • 2014. Computation and Multiple Realizability. In V. C. Mueller (Ed.), Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Berlin – Heidelberg: Springer.

Professor Milkowski will give the Simon Award Keynote Address at IACAP 2016 June 14-17, University of Ferrara, Italy. Please join us in congratulating Professor Milkowski on this well-deserved award.