Brian Cantwell Smith holds the Reid Hoffman Chair in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Human at the University of Toronto, where he is Professor of Information, Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. After receiving his PhD from MIT in AI and Computer Science, he worked at Xerox PARC, taught at Stanford, was a founder and principal investigator of the Centre for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), and a founder and first president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR). From 1996 to 2001 he taught cognitive science, computer science, and philosophy at Indiana University, and from 2001 to 2003 he was University Professor of Philosophy and New Technology at Duke University. He moved to the University of Toronto in 2003, initially as Dean of the Faculty of Information. In the 1980s Smith developed the world’s first reflective programming language (3-Lisp). His research focuses on the philosophical foundations of computation and AI, and on metaphysics and epistemology. He is the author of On the Origin of Objects (MIT Press, 1996), and of Reckoning and Judgment (MIT Press, 2019). During his residency at the Neubauer Collegium, he collaborated on the Organon for the Information Age project and delivered a lecture on the implications of deep learning and second-wave AI.

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