Rate My Professor Mariarosaria Taddeo

Professor Mariarosaria Taddeo is Professor of Digital Ethics and Defence Technologies at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where she leads the Digital Ethics and Defence Technologies research group. She holds an MA in Philosophy from the University of Bari, with a thesis on the Symbol Grounding Problem, and a PhD (Doctor Europeus) in Philosophy from the University of Padua, focusing on the epistemic and ethical implications of trust in distributed artificial systems. Her career includes a Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Hertfordshire on the ethics of information warfare, and Research Fellow in Cybersecurity and Ethics at the University of Warwick. She joined the Oxford Internet Institute as a Researcher in 2016, advanced to Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor in 2020, and received her professorial title in 2023. From 2021 to 2025, she was Dstl Ethics Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, London, and served as Programme Director of the DPhil in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences from 2021 to 2024.

Taddeo specializes in digital ethics, philosophy of technology, ethics of cyber conflicts, cybersecurity, and the ethical and social implications of AI in high-risk domains like national defence. She has published over 150 articles in journals such as Nature, Nature Machine Intelligence, Science, and Science Robotics, including highly cited works like 'The ethics of algorithms: Mapping the debate' (Big Data & Society, 2016) and 'What Is Data Ethics?' (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 2016). Key books include The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence in Defence (Oxford University Press, 2024), A Companion to Digital Ethics (Wiley, 2025), The Responsibilities of Online Service Providers (Springer, 2016), and Ethics and Policies for Cyber Operations (Springer, 2016). Her contributions have shaped policy and institutional design in digital ethics. Awards include the 2010 Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy, 2016 World Technology Award for Ethics, recognition by InspiringFifty (2018) and ORBIT (top 100 women in AI ethics), Outstanding Rising Talent by Women’s Forum for Economy and Society (2020), and Grande Ufficiale al Merito della Repubblica Italiana (2023). She serves on the UK Ministry of Defence Ethics Advisory Panel since 2021, represented the UK on NATO’s Human Factors and Medicine Exploratory Team on Operational Ethics (2018-2020), was Oxford Fellow at the World Economic Forum’s Future Council for Cybersecurity (2016-2018), and is Editor-in-Chief of Minds & Machines (SpringerNature) since 2016.