The Advisory Board of the Vodafone Institute

Vodafone Chair Mobile Communications/TU Dresden

Gerhard Fettweis earned his Ph.D. under H. Meyr’s supervision from RWTH Aachen in 1990. After one year at IBM Research in San Jose, CA, he moved to TCSI Inc., Berkeley, CA. Since 1994 he is Vodafone Chair Professor at TU Dresden, Germany, with 20 companies from Asia/Europe/US sponsoring his research on wireless transmission and chip design. He coordinates 2 DFG centers at TU Dresden, namely cfaed and HAEC.

Gerhard Fettweis is IEEE Fellow, member of the German academy acatech, and his most recent award is the Stuart Meyer Memorial Award from IEEE VTS. In Dresden he has spun-out eleven start-ups, and setup funded projects in volume of close to EUR 1/2 billion. He has helped organizing IEEE conferences, most notably as TPC Chair of ICC 2009 and of TTM 2012, and as General Chair of VTC Spring 2013 and DATE 2014.

Professor for Databases and Artificial Intelligence/University of Ulm, Member of the Club of Rome holds a faculty position for “Data Bases / Artificial Intelligence” at the University of Ulm and, at the same time, is the Director of FAW/n (Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing/n), Ulm (Germany).

Member of the Club of Rome and of several national and international advisory boards as well as President of the Senat der Wirtschaft e.V. (Senate of the Economy), Bonn, President of the Global Economic Network (GEN), Vienna, and Vice President of the Ecosocial Forum Europe, Vienna.

1997 Scientific Award of the German Society for Mathematics, Economics and Operations Research. 2005 Laureate of the Salzburg Award for Future Research, Salzburg, Austria.

2007 Laureate of „Vision Award 2007“ of Global Economic Network (for Global Marshall Plan Initiative). 2007 Laureate of Karl-Werner-Kieffer Award (Stiftung Ökologie und Landbau, SÖL). Member of the Rotarian Action Group for Population & Development (RFPD) – German Section – e.V. Member of the German National Committee of the UNESCO for the World Decade „Education for Sustainable Development“ (2005 – 2014). 2012 Laureate of the Umweltpreis „Goldener Baum“ der Stiftung für Ökologie und Demokratie e.V. 2013 Fellow to the World Academy of Art & Science (WAAS). 2013 Award of the degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris causa) of the International Hellenic University, Thessaloniki.

Luciano Floridi, (Laurea Rome ‘La Sapienza’, MPhil, PhD Warw, MA Oxon, Dr. h. c. Suceava), FoASS, FAIBS, FBCS, MAIPS)

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he is Director of the Digital Ethics Lab of the Oxford Internet Institute, and Fellow of Exeter College. He is also Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, of the Academy of Social Sciences, of the British Computer Society and of the AIBS (the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour) and Member of the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Sciences. His current commitments include being Chair of Ethics Committee of Digital Catapult, the UK Innovation Programme, and member of several organisations, including the Board of the UK Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation.

His areas of expertise include digital ethics, the ethics of AI, the philosophy of information, and the philosophy of technology, topics on which he is an internationally renowned authority and has published more than 300 works. They have bene translated into many languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Among his recent books, all published by Oxford University Press: The Logic of Information (2019), The Fourth Revolution – How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (2014), winner of the J. Ong Award; The Ethics of Information (2013); and The Philosophy of Information (2011).

He is deeply engaged with emerging policy initiatives on the socio-ethical value and implications of digital technologies and their applications. And has collaborated closely on digital/data ethics (including the ethics of algorithms and AI) with the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the Cabinet Office, FCA, DCMS, ICO, the CDEI in the UK and, internationally, with the EU Parliament, the European Commission, the Council of Europe, UNESCO, the German Ethics Council, Italy’s Camera dei Deputati, as well as with many multinational corporations, such as AstraZeneca, Capgemini, Cisco, DeepMind, Deloitte, EY, Facebook, Google, IBM, Fujitsu, Leonardo, Microsoft, Phillips, Poste Italiane, SoftBank, Sogeti, Tencent, Vodafone, and Volkswagen.

He has received many recognitions, including the Barwise Prize, the Gauss Professorship of the Akademie der Wissenschaften of Göttingen, the Covey Award, the Weizenbaum Award, the J. Ong Award, IBM’s Thinker Award, Premio Aretè, CogX Award, and Premio Socrate, among others.