Gualtiero Piccinini, associate professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at UMSL, will receive the 2014 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy from the International Association for Computing and Philosophy. (Photo by August Jennewein)

University of Missouri–St. Louis scholar Gualtiero Piccinini is being honored for his research by an international philosophy association.

Piccinini, associate professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at UMSL, will receive the 2014 Herbert A. Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy from the International Association for Computing and Philosophy.

“I’m thrilled to receive the Herbert A. Simon award,” Piccinini said. “I didn’t know I was a contender so it came as a complete surprise. I am grateful that they chose me. The award recognizes that my research is having an impact and shows that people are starting to notice.”

The award honors scholars at an early stage of their academic career who are likely to reshape debates at the nexus of computing and philosophy by original research. Nominations are proposed either by academic institutions or by colleagues with some expertise in computing and philosophy.

The Herbert A. Simon award is named after Carnegie Mellon University Professor Herbert A. Simon, an expert in cognitive psychology and computer science and winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Economics, the National Medal of Science and many other awards. He died in 2001 at the age of 84. He made extensive use of the computer as tool for both simulating human thinking and augmenting it with artificial intelligence. Simon was widely considered to be a founder of the field of artificial intelligence.

Piccinini has been invited to give a keynote speech at the IACAP 2014 conference this summer in Thessaloniki, Greece.