Igor Aleksander

Igor Aleksander is currently (2005) an emeritus professor of Neural Systems 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

*Artificial Intelligence
*Neural Networks
*IT Management
*Artificial Visual Awareness (in collaboration with California Institute of Technology)
*Robots with a representation of self

Publications

The World in My Mind, My Mind In The World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in Humans, Animals and Machinespublished by Imprint Academic, 2005.
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].
Axioms and Tests for the Presence of Minimal Consciousness in Agents, Journal of Consciousness Studies 2003 [2].

Original work

*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

*Outstanding Achievement Medal for Informatics by the Institution of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (2000)

UK TV appearances

*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

External links

*Home page
*Interview
*Artificial Neuroconsciousness: An Update
*Guardian interview 23-June-2005