Luciano Floridi

Luciano Floridi’s background

He is the OII’s Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he is also the Director of the Digital Ethics Lab of the Oxford Internet Institute. Furthermore, he is 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.

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. He has published over a 150 papers in these areas, in many anthologies and peer-reviewed journals. His works have been translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

His lifetime project is a tetralogy (not his term) on the foundation of the philosophy of information, called Principia Philosophiae Informationis.

His most recent books are

• The Fourth Revolution – How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (Oxford University Press, 2014)
• The Ethics of Information (Oxford University Press, 2013, volume two of the tetralogy )
• The Philosophy of Information (Oxford University Press, 2011, volume one of the tetralogy)
• Information – A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010)

He has edited many volumes, including

• The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003)
• The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
• The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Information (Routledge, 2016)

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

Currently, he is a Member of the EU’s Ethics Advisory Group on Ethical Dimensions of Data Protection, of the Royal Society and British Academy Working Group on Data Policy, of Google Advisory Board on “the right to be forgotten”, of the Advisory Board of Tencent’s Internet and Society Institute, and of NEXA’ Board of Trustees.

He is the Chairman of the Ethics Advisory Board of the European Medical Information Framework (a €56 million EU project on medical informatics).