Margaret “Maggie” Boden, Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, has won the 2019 K. Jon Barwise Prize from the American Philosophical Association (APA).

The Barwise Prize is awarded annually for “significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing by an APA member.”

Margaret Boden

Professor Boden helped develop the world’s first academic program in cognitive science (at Sussex). According to her biographical note at The British Academy:

She holds degrees in medical sciences, philosophy, and psychology (including a Harvard PhD, Cambridge ScD, and three honorary doctorates), and integrates these disciplines with AI in her research. She is a past vice-president of the British Academy and past Chair of Council of the Royal Institution, and an elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (and of its British and European equivalents). Her work has been translated into twenty languages, and she has lectured widely, to specialist and general audiences, around the world. She was the subject of BBC Radio-4’s The Life Scientific in October 2014. Her recent books include The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms (1990/2004); Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (2006); and Creativity and Art: Three Roads to Surprise (2010)… She has two children and four grandchildren, and lives in Brighton.

Her latest book is AI: Its Nature and Future (2016).

The Barwise Prize includes a plaque and the honor of delivering a keynote talk at a computing and philosophy conference as well as a talk at one of the divisional APA meetings. You can see a list of previous winners of the prize here. For more about Jon Barwise, for whom the prize is named, see this obituary.