Professor Peter Asaro is a philosopher of science, technology and media. He is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the School of Media Studies at The New School, in New York City, and an Affiliate Scholar at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. His research focuses on the social, cultural, political, legal and ethical dimensions of automation and autonomous technologies, from a perspective that combines philosophy, media theory and science and technology studies. He is the co-editor of Machine Ethics and Robot Ethics (2017), and has written widely-cited papers on autonomous weapons from the perspective of just war theory and human rights, and the legal and moral issues raised by law enforcement robots and predictive policing.
He has also developed technologies in the areas of virtual reality, data visualization, human-computer interaction, computer-supported cooperative work, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, and robotics at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA), the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and Iguana Robotics, Inc., and was involved in the design of the natural language interface for the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine for Wolfram Research.
In 2009, Prof. Asaro co-founded the International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), which in 2012 joined a coalition of NGOs in the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, where he serves on the steering committee.