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Anthony Beavers, IACAP president and professor of philosophy and director of cognitive science at the University of Evansville, was presented with the 2012 World Technology Award in Ethics this past Tuesday night at a special ceremony held at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City.

He was recognized for his work in moral theory, which attempts to show how and why existing ethical frameworks are insufficiently suited to the information age and why ethicists need to develop other alternatives.

The World Technology Awards are presented in association with TIME, Fortune, CNN, Technology Review, and Science and go to the “peer-nominated, peer-elected most innovative people in science and technology” defined as those doing “the innovative work of the likely longest significance.”
Thirty awards are offered each year, twenty to individuals and ten to corporations. Winners this year included SpaceX, the first private company to get a rocket to the space station and back, Ekso Bionics for successfully developing technology to allow paraplegics to walk on their own through the use of a robotic exoskeleton, and NASA Engineer Adam Steltzner of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for his role in successfully landing the rover Curiosity on Mars this past August. Among the more recognizable past recipients of World Technology Awards are Al Gore (for Policy), Linus Torvalds, developer of the Linux operating system (for Commerce / Communication Technology), Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World-Wide Web (for Communication Technology), Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google (for Marketing Communications), and Mark Zuckerberg, lead developer and co-founder of Facebook (also for Marketing Communications).

The International Association for Computing and Philosophy is pleased to announce that Luciano Floridi (Hertfordshire and Oxford) is the 4th recipient of its Covey Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. This award is reserved for a senior scholar who has made significant research contributions to the field. Past recipients include Ed Zalta (Stanford), John Searle (Berkeley), and Terry Bynum (Southern Connecticut).

Dr. Floridi holds the UNESCO Chair in Information and Computing Ethics at Hertfordshire. He has recently published two books on the philosophy of information with Oxford and is about to release a third on information ethics. In 2009, he became the first philosopher to be elected Gauss Professor by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. The same year, he was awarded the Barwise Prize by the American Philosophical Association in recognition of his research on the philosophy of information, and was elected Fellow of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour. In 2010, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Springer’s new journal Philosophy & Technology and elected Fellow of the Center for Information Policy Research, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. In 2011, he awarded a laurea honoris causa by the University of Suceava, Romania, for his research on the philosophy of information. In 2012, he was appointed appointed Chairman of the expert group, organised by the DG INFSO of the European Commission, on the impact of information and communication technologies on the digital transformations occurring in the European society.

We are grateful to Dr. Floridi for the pioneering work he has done to advance a research agenda that is both timely and relevant to a quickly changing world. He will be recognized for his work at the 2012 AISB/IACAP World Congress to be held in honor of Alan Turing at the University of Birmingham this July.

The latest IACAP newsletter has just been released.

After having used ia-cap.org (with a hyphen)  for our association the last few years, iacap.org is finally back. This site will become the main hub for our association as soon as we have designed everything from scratch. We will inform you on our mailing list as soon as the new site is up and running. In the meantime, please continue referring to ia-cap.org.