Staff news: Tom Sterkenburg joins LSE

We are please to announce that Tom Sterkenburg will join LSE as Assistant Professor of Philosophy with focus on AI.

He says about his appointment: "I'm delighted to be joining the LSE Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method in the coming year, and to become part of such a fantastic community of researchers. I feel honoured to inherit and continue the department's unique tradition in the philosophy of science. I think that, in particular, philosophical and methodological reflection on machine learning and artificial intelligence will only gain urgency in the years ahead, and I'm greatly looking forward to helping further strengthen the department's profile as the place to be for the study and research in this area."

Tom Sterkenburg is currently Emmy Noether group leader at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP, LMU Munich) and the Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML). He works on the epistemological foundations of artificial intelligence, bringing together insights from the philosophy of science and the mathematics of machine learning. His work was recognized with the Wolfgang Stegmüller Award of the German Society for Analytic Philosophy and the Karl-Heinz Hoffmann Award of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences. His latest research is concerned with the fundamental notion of inductive bias—the assumptions that allow a learning algorithm to learn.