Mariarosaria Taddeo has been awarded the title of Professor of Digital Ethics and Defence Technologies by the Vice Chancellor of the University of Oxford, in recognition of her exceptional contribution to research into the ethical, legal, and social implications of digital technologies.

Professor Taddeo is a philosopher working on the ethics of digital technologies. Her most recent work focuses on digital ethics, spanning from environmental implications of the development of AI technologies to the ethical, legal, social and governance implications of using digital technologies for national defence and security purposes. She is also the Programme Director of the DPhil in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences at the Oxford Internet Institute and a DSTL Ethics Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute.

Professor Taddeo welcomed the conferment of the title: “I take the recognition of distinction as an acknowledgment of the value of research and teaching focusing on the ethical implications of digital technologies, particularly with respect to their use in the defence domain.

She added: “I am sincerely grateful to the Vice-Chancellor and the Social Science Division for this honour, which I am fortunate enough to share with many colleagues, funders, students, and my mentor. Without them, and the support of the OII, it would have been much harder to advance research in this area.”

OII Director, Associate Professor and Senior Policy Fellow Professor Vicki Nash said: “I’m delighted to see Rosaria awarded Full Professor title.  Rosaria is a brilliant scholar whose impactful research on the ethics of digital defence technologies has deservedly garnered a great deal of academic, policy and media attention.”