Igor Aleksander | |
---|---|
Born | [1] [2] | January 26, 1937
Alma mater | Queen Mary College, London |
Scientific career | |
Thesis | Decimal array logic (1966) |
Igor Aleksander (born 26 January 1937) is an emeritus professor of Neural Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He worked in artificial intelligence and neural networks and designed the world's first neural pattern recognition system in the 1980s. [4]
Aleksander was educated in Italy and graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, arriving in the UK in the late 1950s, intending to become a research student under Colin Cherry. Instead he found work with Standard Telephones and Cables, later joining Queen Mary College where he gained a PhD, subsequently becoming a lecturer there in 1961. He moved to the University of Kent in 1968 as a reader in Electronics and then to Brunel University as professor in 1974. In 1984 he became professor at Imperial College London as professor of the Management of Information Technology. [1] He was Head of Electrical Engineering and Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College from 1988 to his retirement in 2002. [5] He was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1988), and he served as Pro-rector of External Relations at Imperial College (1997). In 2005 he presented the Bernard Price Memorial Lecture.
His work centred on the modelling capability of artificial neural networks. He devised neuromodels of the visual system in primates, visuo-verbal system in humans, the effect of anaesthetics on awareness, and artificial consciousness. He inspired the engineering design of one of the first stand alone neural pattern recognition systems, the WISARD (anonym for Wilkie Stonham Aleksander's Recognition Device) which was named after the co-inventors Bruce Wilkie, John Stonham and Igor Aleksander. This Brunel University prototype WISARD was commercially developed and marketed by Computer Recognition Systems, Wokingham, under the trade name of ’CRS WISARD’ in 1984. After this, the further developments of this system do not appear to have been documented. A popular link for WISARD is that of “the wisard pattern recognition machine” at the Winton Gallery, British Science Museum.
Aleksander received an honorary degree in Computer Engineering from University of Palermo in July 2011.
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision-making to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
In machine learning, a neural network is a model inspired by the structure and function of biological neural networks in animal brains.
Mind uploading is a speculative process of whole brain emulation in which a brain scan is used to completely emulate the mental state of the individual in a digital computer. The computer would then run a simulation of the brain's information processing, such that it would respond in essentially the same way as the original brain and experience having a sentient conscious mind.
Artificial consciousness, also known as machine consciousness, synthetic consciousness, or digital consciousness, is the consciousness hypothesized to be possible in artificial intelligence. It is also the corresponding field of study, which draws insights from philosophy of mind, philosophy of artificial intelligence, cognitive science and neuroscience.
Hans Peter Moravec is computer scientist and an adjunct faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. Moravec also is a futurist with many of his publications and predictions focusing on transhumanism. Moravec developed techniques in computer vision for determining the region of interest (ROI) in a scene.
Neuromorphic computing is an approach to computing that is inspired by the structure and function of the human brain. A neuromorphic computer/chip is any device that uses physical artificial neurons to do computations. In recent times, the term neuromorphic has been used to describe analog, digital, mixed-mode analog/digital VLSI, and software systems that implement models of neural systems. Recent advances have even discovered ways to mimic the human nervous system through liquid solutions of chemical systems.
A neural network, also called a neuronal network, is an interconnected population of neurons. Biological neural networks are studied to understand the organization and functioning of nervous systems.
An artificial brain is software and hardware with cognitive abilities similar to those of the animal or human brain.
Sankar Kumar Pal is a computer scientist and the president of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata. He is also a National Science Chair, Government of India. Pal is a computer scientist with an international reputation on pattern recognition, image processing, fuzzy neural network, rough fuzzy hybridization, soft computing, granular mining, and machine intelligence. He pioneered the development of fuzzy set theory, and neuro-fuzzy and rough-fuzzy computing for uncertainty modelling with demonstration in pattern recognition, image processing, machine learning, knowledge-based systems and data mining. This has made him widely recognized across the world and made India a leader in these disciplines in international scenario. He founded the Machine Intelligence Unit in 1993, and the Center for Soft Computing Research: A National Facility in 2004, both at the ISI. In the process he has created many renowned scientists.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to artificial intelligence:
A confabulation, also known as a false, degraded, or corrupted memory, is a stable pattern of activation in an artificial neural network or neural assembly that does not correspond to any previously learned patterns. The same term is also applied to the (nonartificial) neural mistake-making process leading to a false memory (confabulation).
Erkki Oja is a Finnish computer scientist and Aalto Distinguished Professor in the Department of Information and Computer Science at Aalto University School of Science. He is recognized for developing Oja's rule, which is a model of how neurons in the brain or in artificial neural networks learn over time.
How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is a non-fiction book about brains, both human and artificial, by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. First published in hardcover on November 13, 2012 by Viking Press it became a New York Times Best Seller. It has received attention from The Washington Post, The New York Times and The New Yorker.
Alex Graves is a computer scientist and research scientist at DeepMind.
Jianchang (JC) Mao is a Chinese-American computer scientist and Vice President, Google Assistant Engineering at Google. His research spans artificial intelligence, machine learning, computational advertising, data mining, and information retrieval. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2012 for his contributions to pattern recognition, search, content analysis, and computational advertising.
Simon Stringer is a departmental lecturer, Director of the Oxford Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, and Editor-in-Chief of Network: Computation in Neural Systems published by Taylor & Francis.
Claudia Clopath is a Professor of Computational Neuroscience at Imperial College London and research leader at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour. She develops mathematical models to predict synaptic plasticity for both medical applications and the design of human-like machines.
Michael Bronstein is an Israeli computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is a computer science professor at the University of Oxford and scientific director of Aithyra Institute at the Vienna Biocenter in Austria.
Soft computing is an umbrella term used to describe types of algorithms that produce approximate solutions to unsolvable high-level problems in computer science. Typically, traditional hard-computing algorithms heavily rely on concrete data and mathematical models to produce solutions to problems. Soft computing was coined in the late 20th century. During this period, revolutionary research in three fields greatly impacted soft computing. Fuzzy logic is a computational paradigm that entertains the uncertainties in data by using levels of truth rather than rigid 0s and 1s in binary. Next, neural networks which are computational models influenced by human brain functions. Finally, evolutionary computation is a term to describe groups of algorithm that mimic natural processes such as evolution and natural selection.
Nikola Kirilov Kasabov also known as Nikola Kirilov Kassabov is a Bulgarian and New Zealand computer scientist, academic and author. He is a professor emeritus of Knowledge Engineering at Auckland University of Technology, Founding Director of the Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute (KEDRI), George Moore Chair of Data Analytics at Ulster University, as well as visiting professor at both the Institute for Information and Communication Technologies (IICT) at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Dalian University in China. He is also the Founder and Director of Knowledge Engineering Consulting.