Herman Cappelen is a philosopher. He currently works as a Chair Professor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong. Cappelen is also the Director of AI & Humanity Lab and the co-director of ConceptLab Hong Kong. Before moving to Hong Kong, he worked at the Universities of Oslo, St Andrews, and Oxford. Since 2008, he has been an elected fellow of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and since the same year, he has been an elected member of the Academia Europaea.

He is serving as the Editor-in-Chief of Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. His current research focuses on the philosophy of AI, conceptual engineering, and the connections between those two. However, his research interests are broad, including the philosophical foundations of explainable AI; the social importance of explainable AI; the connections between AI and Philosophy; the nature of interpretable AI; communication between humans and AI; and the metaphysics of virtual reality.