Kevin Warwick

Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, England, where he carries out research in artificial intelligence, control, robotics and biomedical engineering. He is a Chartered Engineer (CEng.) and is a Fellow of The Institution of Engineering & Technology (FIET). He is the youngest person ever to become a Fellow of the City & Guilds of London Institute (FCGI).

Kevin was born in Coventry, UK and left school to join British Telecom, at the age of 16. At 22 he took his first degree at Aston University, followed by a PhD and a research post at Imperial College, London. He subsequently held positions at Oxford, Newcastle and Warwick universities before being offered the Chair at Reading, at the age of 33.

He has been awarded higher doctorates (DScs) both by Imperial College and the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague. He was presented with The Future of Health Technology Award from MIT (USA), was made an Honorary Member of the Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, was awarded the IEE Senior Achievement Medal in 2004 and received The Mountbatten Medal in 2008. In 2000 Kevin presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled “The Rise of The Robots”. He has also been awarded Honorary (DSc) Degrees by the Universities of Aston, Coventry and Bradford.

Kevin instigated a series of pioneering experiments involving the neuro-surgical implantation of a device (Utah Array/BrainGate) into the median nerves of his left arm in order to link his nervous system directly to a computer to assess the latest technology for use with the disabled. The development of the implant technology was carried out by a team of researchers headed by Dr Mark Gasson who, along with Kevin, used it to perform the ground-breaking research. Kevin was successful with the first extra-sensory (ultrasonic) input for a human and with the first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans. His research has been discussed by the US White House Presidential Council on BioEthics, The European Commission FTP and led to him being widely referenced and featured in academic circles as well as appearing as cover stories in several magazines – e.g. Wired (USA), The Week (India).

The Institute of Physics selected Kevin as one of only 7 eminent scientists to illustrate the ethical impact their scientific work can have: the others being Galileo, Einstein, Curie, Nobel, Oppenheimer and Rotblat.

His work is used as material in several advanced Level Physics courses in the UK and in many University courses including Harvard, Stanford, MIT & Tokyo. His implants are on display in the Science Museums in London and Naples. As a result, Kevin regularly gives invited Keynote presentations.

Kevin’s research involves robotics and he was responsible (with Dr Jim Wyatt) for Cybot, a robot exported around the world as part of a magazine “Real Robots” – this resulted in royalties totalling over £1M for Reading University. Robots designed and constructed by Kevin’s group (Dr Ian Kelly, Dr Ben Hutt) have been on permanent interactive display in the Science Museums in London, Birmingham and Linz.

Kevin’s recent research involves a collaborative project with the Oxford neurosurgeon, Prof. Tipu Aziz, using intelligent computer methods to predict the onset of Parkinsonian tremors such that they can be stopped by means of a deep brain implant. This work was hailed in the Mail on Sunday as “the most significant recent advance in biomedical engineering”.

He presently leads an ongoing EPSRC sponsored project in which a cultured neural network (using biological neurons) is trained to control a mobile robot platform. This work, which was reported on in a New Scientist feature article, is being used as an exercise for high school science studies in the UK. A Youtube video of this research has now been downloaded/viewed over 1.25 million times.