Igor Aleksander
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Igor Aleksander is currently (2004) the Professor of Neural Systems Engineering and holds the Gabor Chair of Electrical Engineering at Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, London.
Research interests include:
- Neuromodelling of the Visual system in primates
- Visuo-verbal system in humans
- Modelling the effect of anaesthetics on awareness
- The meaning of artificial consciousness
Career summary:
- educated in Italy and South Africa
- arrived in UK (late 50s)
- joined Standard Telephone and Cable (STC) as a graduate engineer
- lecturer at Queen Mary College, London (1961)
- Reader in Electronics at University of Kent (1968)
- Professor of Electronics at Brunel University (1974)
- Professor of Management of Information Technology at Imperial College (1984)
- Head of Electrical Engineering and Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College (1988)
- Fellow of Royal Academy of Engineering (1988)
- Pro-rector of External Relations at Imperial College (1997)
Research topics include:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Neural Networks
- IT Management
- Artificial Visual Awareness (in collaboration with California Institute of Technology)
- Robots with a representation of self
Publications include:
- Impossible Minds: My neurons, My Consciousness published by Imperial College Press 1996 (ISBN 1860940366).
- I. Aleksander (1996) Neuroconsciousness: A theoretical framework, Neurocomputing, vol. 12, no.2-3, pp. 91-111.
- N. Sales, R. Evans, I. Aleksander (1996) Successful naive representation grounding, ArtificialIntelligence Review, vol. 10,no.1-2, pp.83-102.
- C. Browne, I. Aleksander (1996) Digital general neural units with controlled transitionprobabilities, Electronics Letters, vol. 32, no. 9, pp.824-825 April.
- N. P. Bradshaw, I. Aleksander (1996) Improving the generalisation of the N-tuple classifier using the effective VCdimension, Electronics Letters Vol: 32 Iss: 20 p. 1904-5 26 September.
- I. Aleksander, C. Browne, R. Evans, N. Sales (1997) Conscious and Neural Cognizers: A Review and Some RecentApproaches, Neural Networks, Vol. 10, No. 7, pp 1303-1316.
- I. Aleksander (1998) From WISARD to MAGNUS: A Family of Weightless Neural Machines, In: James Austin (Ed),RAM-Based Neural Networks, London: World Scientific, pp 18-30.
- I. Aleksander (1999) Evolutionary Checkers, Nature, Vol. 402, Dec. 1999, pp857-860.
- I. Aleksander (2000) Brain Inspired Computation, RSA Journal. Vol 4, No. 4, pp 74 - 78
- How to Build a Mind, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 2000 [1] (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023112/0231120125.HTM).
- Axioms and Tests for the Presence of Minimal Consciousness in Agents, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2003 [2] (http://www.imprint.co.uk/jcs_10_4-5.html#aleksander).
Original work includes:
- design of the world's first neural pattern recognition system, the WISARD (marketed by CRS, Wokingham) in the 1980s
- MAGNUS neurocomputational system (marketed by NTS as Neural Representation Modeller)
Prizes include:
- Outstanding Achievement Medal for Informatics by the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (2000)
UK TV appearances include:
- Horizon
- The Late Show
- Tomorrow's World
- Equinox
- Newsnight
- Wide World
- Eureka
- The Big Bang
- The Afternoon Shift
- Start the Week
- Inspiration
- Desert Island Discs
- In Our Time
- The Network
- Letter to the Future
Links:
- Home page (http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/research/neural/aleksander.html)
- Interview (http://www.compulink.co.uk/~hewitt/misc5.htm)
- Artificial Neuroconsciousness: An Update (http://www.ee.ic.ac.uk/research/neural/publications/iwann.html)