Kevin Warwick

Best known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, Warwick is a British scientist and professor of cybernetics whose research also spans the field of robotics. In 1976 he took his first degree at Aston University, followed by a Ph.D and a research post at Imperial College London. He subsequently held positions at Oxford, Newcastle, and Warwick universities before being offered the Chair in Cybernetics at the University of Reading in 1987.

Warwick is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and a Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute. He has served as Visiting Professor at the Czech Technical University in Prague and in 2004 was Senior Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He has also served as Director of the University of Reading Knowledge Transfer Partnerships Centre, which linked the University with companies, and has sat on the Advisory Boards of the Instinctive Computing Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University and the Centre for Intermedia at the University of Exeter. Warwick was awarded higher doctorates (D.Sc.) by Imperial College and by the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague.

He has carried out research in artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, control systems, and robotics. Much of his early research was in the area of discrete time adaptive control. Warwick introduced the first state space based self-tuning controller and unified discrete time state space representations of ARMA models. He also contributed in mathematics, power engineering, and manufacturing production machinery.

He headed an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council supported research project that investigated the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques in order to suitably stimulate and translate patterns of electrical activity from living cultured neural networks, with the aim of utilizing those networks for the control of mobile robots. A biological brain thus provided the behavior process for each robot. It was expected that the method would be extended to the control of a robot head.