Anthony Beavers, professor of philosophy and director of cognitive science at the University of Evansville, was presented with the 2012 World Technology Award in Ethics this past Tuesday night at a special ceremony held at Rockefeller Plaza in New York City.

He was recognized for his work in moral theory, which attempts to show how and why existing ethical frameworks are insufficiently suited to the information age and why ethicists need to develop other alternatives.

The World Technology Awards are presented in association with TIME, Fortune, CNN, Technology Review, and Science and go to the "peer-nominated, peer-elected most innovative people in science and technology" defined as those doing "the innovative work of the likely longest significance."

Thirty awards are offered each year, twenty to individuals and ten to corporations. Winners this year included SpaceX, the first private company to get a rocket to the space station and back, Ekso Bionics for successfully developing technology to allow paraplegics to walk on their own through the use of a robotic exoskeleton, and NASA Engineer Adam Steltzner of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for his role in successfully landing the rover Curiosity on Mars this past August. Among the more recognizable past recipients of World Technology Awards are Al Gore (for Policy), Linus Torvalds, developer of the Linux operating system (for Commerce / Communication Technology), Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World-Wide Web (for Communication Technology), Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google (for Marketing Communications), and Mark Zuckerberg, lead developer and co-founder of Facebook (also for Marketing Communications).