Igor Aleksander

FREng Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) is an award and Scholarship, fellowship for engineers who are recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering as being the best and brightest engineers, inventors and technologists in the UK a ...

(born 26 January 1937) is an

emeritus professor ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

of Neural Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at

Imperial College London Imperial College London (legally Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom. Its history began with Prince Albert, consort of Queen Victoria, who developed his vision for a cu ...

. He worked in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

and

neural networks A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

and designed the world's first neural pattern recognition system in the 1980s.

Life and work

Aleksander was educated in

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

and graduated from the

University of the Witwatersrand The University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (), is a multi-campus South African public research university situated in the northern areas of central Johannesburg. It is more commonly known as Wits University or Wits ( or ). The university ...

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the north by the neighbouring coun ...

, arriving in the UK in the late 1950s, intending to become a research student under

Colin Cherry Edward Colin Cherry (23 June 1914 – 23 November 1979) was a British cognitive scientist whose main contributions were in focused auditory attention, specifically the cocktail party problem regarding the capacity to follow one conversati ...

. Instead he found work with Standard Telephones and Cables, later joining

Queen Mary College , mottoeng = With united powers , established = 1785 – The London Hospital Medical College1843 – St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College1882 – Westfield College1887 – East London College/Queen Mary College , type = Public researc ...

where he gained a PhD, subsequently becoming a lecturer there in 1961. He moved to the

University of Kent , motto_lang = , mottoeng = Literal translation: 'Whom to serve is to reign'(Book of Common Prayer translation: 'whose service is perfect freedom')Graham Martin, ''From Vision to Reality: the Making of the University of Kent at Canterbury'' ...

in 1968 as a reader in Electronics and then to

Brunel University Brunel University London is a public research university located in the Uxbridge area of London, England. It was founded in 1966 and named after the Victorian engineer and pioneer of the Industrial Revolution, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. In Jun ...

as professor in 1974. In 1984 he became professor at

as professor of the Management of Information Technology. He was Head of Electrical Engineering and Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College from 1988 to his retirement in 2002. He was elected Fellow of the

Royal Academy of Engineering The Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) is the United Kingdom's national academy of engineering. The Academy was founded in June 1976 as the Fellowship of Engineering with support from Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became the first senior ...

(1988), and he served as Pro-rector of External Relations at Imperial College (1997). In 2005 he presented the

Bernard Price Memorial Lecture The Bernard Price Memorial Lecture is the premier annual lecture of the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers. It is of general scientific or engineering interest and is given by an invited guest, often from overseas, at several of the ...

. His work centred on the modelling capability of

artificial neural network Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

s. He devised neuromodels of the

visual system The visual system comprises the sensory organ (the eye) and parts of the central nervous system (the retina containing photoreceptor cells, the optic nerve, the optic tract and the visual cortex) which gives organisms the sense of sight (th ...

in primates, visuo-verbal system in humans, the effect of anaesthetics on

awareness Awareness is the state of being conscious of something. More specifically, it is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognizant of events. Another definition describes it as a state wherein a subject is aware of some in ...

, and

artificial consciousness Artificial consciousness (AC), also known as machine consciousness (MC) or synthetic consciousness (; ), is a field related to artificial intelligence and cognitive robotics. The aim of the theory of artificial consciousness is to "Define that w ...

. He inspired the engineering design of one of the first stand alone neural pattern recognition systems, the WISARD (anonym for Wilkie Stonham Aleksander's Recognition Device) which was named after the co-inventors Bruce Wilkie, John Stonham and Igor Aleksander. This Brunel University prototype WISARD was commercially developed and marketed by Computer Recognition Systems, Wokingham, under the trade name of ’CRS WISARD’ in 1984. After this, the further developments of this system do not appear to have been documented. A popular link for WISARD is that of “the wisard pattern recognition machine” at the Winton Gallery, British Science Museum. Aleksander received an honorary degree in Computer Engineering from

University of Palermo The University of Palermo ( it, Università degli Studi di Palermo) is a university located in Palermo, Italy, and founded in 1806. It is organized in 12 Faculties. History The University of Palermo was officially founded in 1806, although its ...

in Jul 2011.

Selected publications

;Books * 2005, ''The World in My Mind, My Mind In The World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in Humans, Animals and Machines'' published by Imprint Academic, . * 2000, ''How to Build a Mind'', London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson * 1996, ''Impossible Minds: My neurons, My Consciousness'' published by Imperial College Press . * 1975, I.Aleksander, F. Keith Hanna, ''Automata Theory: An Engineering Approach'' New York: Crane Russak, London: Edward Arnold. * 1971, ''Microcircuit learning computers'', London: Mills & Boon Monographs and Technical Library ;Articles * 2008
"Machine consciousness"
Scholarpedia 3(2):4162. * 2003, "Axioms and Tests for the Presence of Minimal Consciousness in Agents", in: '' Journal of Consciousness Studies'' * 1997, ''Evolutionary Checkers'' in: ''Nature'', Vol. 402, Dec. 1999, pp. 857–860. * 1997, I. Aleksander, C. Browne, R. Evans, N. Sales, "Conscious and Neural Cognizers: A Review and Some Recent Approaches", in: ''Neural Networks'', Vol. 10, No. 7, pp. 1303–1316. * 1996, N. Sales, R. Evans, I. Aleksander. "Successful naive representation grounding", in: ''Artificial Intelligence Review'', vol. 10, no.1–2, pp. 83–102. * 1994, K. Warwick. "Weightless brains", Review of Neurons and Symbols by Igor Aleksander and Helen Morton, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, p. 31, February (1994)

References

External links

Artificial Intelligence
1999-04-29, BBC Radio program In Our Time {{DEFAULTSORT:Aleksander, Igor 1937 births Academics of Imperial College London Academics of the University of Kent Academics of Brunel University London Artificial intelligence researchers Cyberneticists Living people Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering Alumni of Queen Mary University of London People associated with The Institute for Cultural Research Croatian engineers British computer scientists

Life and work

See also

Selected publications

References

External links