Dr. Kevin Warwick

A British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom. He is best known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, although he has also done much research in the field of robotics. In 1976 he took his first degree at Aston University, followed by a Ph.D and a research post at Imperial College London. He subsequently held positions at Oxford, Newcastle and Warwick universities before being offered the Chair in Cybernetics at the University of Reading in 1987. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and a Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute. He is Visiting Professor at the Czech Technical University in Prague and in 2004 was Senior Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is also Director of the University of Reading Knowledge Transfer Partnerships Centre, which links the University with Companies and is on the Advisory Boards of the Instinctive Computing Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University and the Centre for Intermedia, University of Exeter. He has been awarded higher doctorates (D.Sc.) by Imperial College and by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague. He carries out research in artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, control systems and robotics. Much of his early research was in the area of discrete time adaptive control. He introduced the first state space based self-tuning controller and unified discrete time state space representations of ARMA models. However he also contributed in mathematics, power engineering and manufacturing production machinery. He presently heads an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council supported research project which investigates the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques in order to suitably stimulate and translate patterns of electrical activity from living cultured neural networks in order to utilize the networks for the control of mobile robots. Hence a biological brain actually provides the behavior process for each robot. It is expected that the method will be extended to the control of a robot head.