Professor Luciano Floridi

About

Professor Luciano Floridi is the Oxford Internet Institute's (OII) Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information, where he is also the Director of the Digital Ethics Lab, at the University of Oxford. He is also Distinguished Research Fellow of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics of the Faculty of Philosophy and Research Associate and Fellow in Information Policy of the Department of Computer Science, also at Oxford.

Outside Oxford, he is Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute (the national institute for data science) and Chair of its Data Ethics Group; and Adjunct Professor (Distinguished Scholar in Residence) of the Department of Economics, American University, Washington D.C.

His research concerns primarily information and computer ethics (aka digital ethics), the philosophy of information, and the philosophy of technology. Other research interests include epistemology, philosophy of logic, and the history and philosophy of scepticism. Professor Floridi has published over a 150 papers in these areas, in many anthologies and peer-reviewed journals, and his works have been translated into many languages.

His lifetime project is a tetralogy on the foundation of the philosophy of information, called Principia Philosophiae Informationis.

Professor Floridi was born in Rome and educated at Rome University La Sapienza, where he graduated in philosophy (laurea) in 1988, first class with distinction. His MPhil (1989; originally a one-year MA, the two-year MPhil was awarded in recognition of the quality of the thesis) and PhD (1990) are both in philosophy, from the University of Warwick. He worked on philosophical logic as a graduate student with Susan Haack (Warwick) then as a postdoc with Michael Dummett (Oxford).

Professor Floridi has held many research and teaching positions here at Oxford, as well as nationally and internationally. In 2009, he also became the first philosopher to be elected Gauss Professor by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, 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. 

Further recent recognition includes:

• Recipient of the Covey Award, by the International Association for Computing and Philosophy, for 'outstanding research in philosophy and computing' (2012).
• Recipient of the Weizenbaum Award for 2013 for his 'significant contribution to the field of information and computer ethics, through his research, service, and vision' (the Award is given every two years by the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology).
• Elected Fellow of the British Computer Society and Member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences (2013).
• Awarded a Cátedras de Excelencia by the University Carlos III of Madrid (UC3M) for his work on the philosophy and ethics of information (2014).
• Elected Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow of the European University Institute (2015).
• Received the Copernicus Scientist Award by the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Ferrara (2016).
• Received the J. Ong Award by the Media Ecology Association for his book The Fourth Revolution; and the Malpensa Prize, by the city of Guarcino, Italy (2016).
• Elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (2017).

Professor Floridi is deeply engaged with emerging policy initiatives on the socio-ethical value and implications of digital technologies and their applications. He has worked, and continues to work, closely on digital ethics (including the ethics of algorithms and AI) with the European Commission, UNESCO, the German Ethics Council, and, in the UK, with the House of Lords, the Cabinet Office, the Information Commissioner’s Office, the Royal Society and British Academy, as well as with multinational corporations (e.g. Cisco, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Tencent).