Life and Work
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 a professor in 1974. 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 was made a 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 has centred on the modelling 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.
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