Igor Aleksander

Igor Aleksander is an engineer, born in 1937, who is emeritus professor of Neural Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He was educated in Italy and at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, then moved to the United Kingdom in the late 1950s. He worked at Standard Telephones and Cables, took a PhD at Queen Mary College, and held posts at the University of Kent, Brunel University and Imperial College, where he was Head of Electrical Engineering and Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering from 1988 until retiring in 2002. His work centred on artificial neural networks, and he inspired the design of WISARD, one of the first stand-alone neural pattern recognition systems, named for Wilkie, Stonham and Aleksander and sold commercially in 1984. He later modelled aspects of consciousness in machines. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1988.