Igor Aleksander
| Igor Aleksander | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1937 (age 74–75)[1] Zagreb,[2] Kingdom of Yugoslavia |
Igor Aleksander FREng (born 1937) is an emeritus professor of Neural Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He worked in artificial intelligence and neural networks and designed the world's first neural pattern recognition system in the 1980s.[1]
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[edit] Life and work
Aleksander was educated in Italy and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, arriving in the UK in the late 1950s, intending to become a research student under Colin Cherry. Instead he found work with Standard Telephones and Cables, later joining Queen Mary College where he gained a PhD, subsequently becoming a lecturer there in 1961. He moved to the University of Kent in 1968 as a reader in Electronics and then to Brunel University as a professor in 1974. In 1984 he took up a chair at Imperial College London as professor of the Management of Information Technology.[1] He became Head of Electrical Engineering and was Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College from 1988 to his retirement in 2002.[3] He was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1988), and he served as Pro-rector of External Relations at Imperial College (1997).
His work has centred on the modelling capability of artificial neural networks. He has devised neuromodels of the visual system in primates, visuo-verbal system in humans, the effect of anaesthetics on awareness, and artificial consciousness. He designed one of the first neural pattern recognition systems, the WISARD (marketed by CRS, Wokingham) in the 1980s.[4]
[edit] See also
- Artificial consciousness
- Artificial Imagination
- Cybernetics Society
- Journal of Consciousness Studies
- Philosophy of artificial intelligence
- Strong AI
- Superintelligence
[edit] Selected publications
- Books
- 2005, The World in My Mind, My Mind In The World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in Humans, Animals and Machinespublished by Imprint Academic, ISBN 1845400216.
- 1996, Impossible Minds: My neurons, My Consciousness published by Imperial College Press ISBN 1-86094-036-6.
- 2000, How to Build a Mind, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson
- Articles
- 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)
- 1996, N. Sales, R. Evans, I. Aleksander. "Successful naive representation grounding", in: Artificial Intelligence Review, vol. 10,no.1-2, pp. 83–102.
- 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.
- 1997, Evolutionary Checkers in: Nature, Vol. 402, Dec. 1999, pp857–860.
- 2003, "Axioms and Tests for the Presence of Minimal Consciousness in Agents", in: Journal of Consciousness Studies
- 2008, "Machine consciousness", Scholarpedia 3(2):4162.
[edit] References
- ^ a b c Gay, Hannah (2007). The history of Imperial College London, 1907-2007: higher education and research in science, technology and medicine. World Scientific. ISBN 1860947093.
- ^ Jha, Alok (2005-06-23). "The simple things are hardest". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/jun/23/scienceinterviews. Retrieved 2009-07-28.
- ^ "Council: Staff Matters". Imperial College London. 2002-10-18. http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/pls/portallive/docs/1/548014.PDF. Retrieved 2009-06-20.
- ^ Igor Aleksander (1937-), Head of Intelligent and Interactive Systems at Imperial College, retrieved 17 April 2008. Aleksander received an honorary degree in Computer Engineering from University of Palermo in Jul 2011.
