Professor Igor Aleksander

Igor was born in Croatia, educated in Italy and South Africa, completed a PhD at Queen Mary College, University of London.In 1984 he took up a chair at Imperial College London as professor of the Management of Information Technology. He became Head of Electrical Engineering and was Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College from 1988 to his retirement in 2002. He has pursued an active research interest in machine consciousness since formal retirement, which has resulted in spate of publication. 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). He was founder of the Association of Information Technology (AIT( and is active as a Trustee. His work has centered on the modeling 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]