Taylor Olson is an Assistant Professor in the department of Computer Science at the University of Iowa. He obtained his PhD from Northwestern University, where he worked in the Qualitative Reasoning Group. His thesis work, which was awarded the IBM PhD Fellowship, presented a mathematical formalism for artificial agents to learn and reason about social and moral norms.

His research in theoretical machine ethics aims to better understand the morality of rational agents and to use this understanding to improve the social and moral competence of AI systems. He is particularly interested in knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR), machine learning (ML), and anything at the intersection of philosophy and AI.