Igor Aleksander

A pioneer in artificial intelligence and neural networks, Aleksander was born in Croatia, educated in Italy and South Africa, and 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 has served as Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College from 1988 to his retirement in 2002.

Aleksander has pursued an active research interest in machine consciousness since formal retirement, which has resulted in a spate of publication. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1988), and he has served as Pro-Rector of External Relations at Imperial College (1997). He is founder of the Association of Information Technology (AIT) and has served as a Trustee.

His work centers on the modeling capability of artificial neural networks. Aleksander devised neuromodels of the visual system in primates, the 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.