2009

Dr. Michael Anderson, an associate professor of computer science at the University of Hartford, West Hartford, Connecticut, earned his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering at the University of Connecticut. His interest in further enabling machine autonomy brought him first to diagrammatic reasoning where he cochaired Diagrams 2000, the first conference on the topic, held at the University of Edinburgh, coedited the book Diagrammatic Representation and Reasoning, and published an article on the topic in Artificial Intelligence, the premier journal on the topic.

This interest has currently led him, in conjunction with Susan Leigh Anderson, to establish machine ethics as a bona fide field of study. They cochaired the AAAI Fall 2005 Symposium on Machine Ethics, coedited an IEEE Intelligent Systems special issue on machine ethics,  and coauthored an invited article on the topic for Artificial Intelligence Magazine. Their research in machine ethics was selected for Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence as an emerging application in 2006.  They are currently writing an article on machine ethics for Scientific American as well as a book on the topic for Cambridge University Press.

Dr. Anderson has been invited to speak at numerous venues including  the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Xerox PARC, NASA Ames Research Center, and, with Dr. S. Anderson, the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting on Philosophy and Computers and the Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference: The Next Fifty Years (AI@50) held to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  He has recently coorganized a AAAI Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Eldercare and maintains the machine ethics website (www.machineethics.org).

“The time has come to add an ethical dimension to at least some machines.”

                    - M. Anderson