Igor Aleksander (born 26 January 1937 in Zagreb, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, present-day Croatia) is a British computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and artificial intelligence researcher.^[1,4,5] He is an Emeritus Professor of Neural Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).

Aleksander attended school in Italy and studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, later receiving his doctorate from Queen Mary College, University of London, in 1966 with his work on decimal array logic. In 1968, he became a Reader in Electronics at the University of Kent, and in 1974, he became a Professor at Brunel University. From 1984, he served as a Professor at Imperial College London, where he was Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering from 1988 until his retirement in 2002, and also served as Pro-Rector for External Relations in 1997.

Working in artificial intelligence and neural networks, he designed the world's first neural pattern recognition system (WISARD) in the early 1980s, which was also commercialized.^[6,4] In addition, he designed neural models of the visual perception system of monkeys with applications in robotics and investigated consciousness and philosophical questions in artificial intelligence (artificial consciousness).

Igor Aleksander was born on 26 January 1937 in Zagreb. He 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 (University of London) where he earned a PhD and became a lecturer in 1961. In 1968, he moved to the University of Kent as a reader in electronics and computer programs and electronic systems, and then to Brunel University as a professor in 1974. In 1984, he became professor of the Management of Information Technology at Imperial College London.^[4] From 1988 until his retirement in 2002, he was Head of Electrical Engineering and Gabor Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College London.^[7,8] Aleksander was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1988, served as Pro-rector and Head of External Relations at Imperial College in 1997, presented the Bernard Price Memorial Lecture in 2005, and received an honorary degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Palermo in July 2011.

His work centered on the modelling capability of artificial neural networks. He devised neuromodels and neurophysiological models of the visual system in primates and mammals, the visuo-verbal system in humans, the effect of anaesthetics on awareness and consciousness, and artificial consciousness. He inspired the engineering design of one of the first stand-alone neural pattern recognition systems, the WISARD (an acronym for Wilkie Stonham Aleksander's Recognition Device), named after 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 'CRS WISARD' in 1984, after which further developments of the system do not appear to have been documented. A popular link for WISARD is 'the wisard pattern recognition machine' at the Winton Gallery in the Science Museum, London.

In 1971, Microcircuit learning computers was published in London by Mills & Boon Monographs and Technical Library. In 1975, I. Aleksander and F. Keith Hanna authored Automata Theory: An Engineering Approach, published in New York by Crane Russak and in London by Edward Arnold. In 1990, I. Aleksander and H. Morton published An Introduction to Neural Computing in London with Chapman & Hall (ISBN 0-412-37780-2). Impossible Minds: My neurons, My Consciousness was published in 1996 by Imperial College Press (ISBN 1-86094-036-6). In 2000, How to Build a Mind was published in London by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. In 2005, The World in My Mind, My Mind In The World: Key Mechanisms of Consciousness in Humans, Animals and Machines was published by Imprint Academic (ISBN 1-84540-021-6).

In February 1994, K. Warwick published "Weightless brains", a review of Neurons and Symbols by Igor Aleksander and Helen Morton, in The Times Higher Education Supplement (p. 31). In 1996, N. Sales, R. Evans, and I. Aleksander published "Successful naive representation grounding" in Artificial Intelligence Review (vol. 10, no. 1–2, pp. 83–102). In 1997, "Evolutionary Checkers" was published in Nature (Vol. 402, Dec. 1999, pp. 857–860). Also in 1997, I. Aleksander, C. Browne, R. Evans, and N. Sales authored "Conscious and Neural Cognizers: A Review and Some Recent Approaches" in Neural Networks (Vol. 10, No. 7, pp. 1303–1316). Subsequent publications include "Axioms and Tests for the Presence of Minimal Consciousness in Agents" in the Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2003, and "Machine consciousness" in Scholarpedia (3(2):4162) in 2008.