Lancaster University’s Professor Plamen Angelov has won a prestigious international award for his pioneering research in the field of artificial intelligence.

Professor Angelov was awarded the 2020 Dennis Gabor Award, which celebrates individual researchers whose work has had a fundamentally important and lasting impact on the field of computational neural networks – a booming area of artificial intelligence (AI) research.

He received the award during the latest International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), which was held in July 2021. The IJCNN is one of the largest conferences in the field of neural networks and is jointly organised by the Institute of Electircal and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Neural Network Society (INNS). The award is accompanied with a plaque as well as a cheque for $1,000.

This award is a recognition of the ‘outstanding contributions to engineering applications of neural networks’. Professor Angelov is at the forefront of the research developments in computational intelligence, evolving systems, autonomous learning and interpretable deep learning. He published extensively in this area and developed numerous methods and algorithms which are widely referenced.

More recently, Professor Angelov pioneered and developed with his PhD students an interpretable deep neural network called xDNN. His work has found innovative applications that span from autonomous driving to flood detection, from security to health applications and beyond.

Professor Angelov said: “I am honoured to be in the same line with the previous recipients of this award such as Teuvo Kohonen who invented the Self-Organising Maps (SOM), Vladimir Vapnik who gave us the Support Vector Machines (SVM), Jose Principe who invented the information theoretic learning and many more outstanding colleagues. This is a recognition for the world-class research that we pursue at Lancaster pushing the boundaries of the known and established, challenging the mainstream and developing advanced research that is addressing the open problems and resulting in useful applications.”

Professor Nigel Davies, Head of Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications, said: “I am absolutely delighted that one of our School of Computing and Communications’ senior academics has been recognised for his contributions to this key area of computer science. It is a fitting testament to Professor Angelov’s outstanding reputation in the field.”