Professor Kevin Warwick

Kevin was formerly Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading, where he is now a Visiting Professor. 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 research post at Imperial College, London. He subsequently held positions at Oxford, Newcastle, Warwick and Reading Universities before moving to Coventry.

As well as publishing over 500 research papers, Kevin’s experiments into implant technology led to him being featured as the cover story on the US magazine, ‘Wired’. His research has involved being a self-experimenter and he is frequently referred to as the world’s first cyborg.

Kevin has been awarded seven Honorary Doctorates by UK Universities, including Coventry. He was presented with The Future of Health Technology Award at MIT, was made an Honorary Member of the Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, received the IEE Senior Achievement Medal, the IET Mountbatten Medal and in 2011 the Ellison-Cliffe Medal from the Royal Society of Medicine. In 2000 Kevin presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, entitled “The Rise of the Robots”.

Kevin’s research has involved the design of an intelligent deep brain stimulator to counteract the effects of Parkinson Disease tremors. The tremors are predicted and a current signal is applied to stop the tremors before they start. Another project involves the use of cultured/biological neural networks to drive robots around – the brain of each robot is made of neural tissue. Kevin is best known for his pioneering experiments involving a neuro-surgical implantation into the median nerves of his own left arm to link his nervous system directly to a computer to assess the latest technology for use with disabled people. He was successful with the first extra-sensory (ultrasonic) input for a human and with the first purely electronic telegraphic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans.

• Tucker, C., Warwick, K., and Holderbaum, W. (2013) 'A Contribution to the Wireless Transmission of Power'. International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems 47 (5), 235-242.
• Kala, R., and Warwick, K. (2013) 'Planning Autonomous Vehicles in the Absence of Speed Lanes using an Elastic Strip'. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems 14 (4), 1743-1752.
• Warwick, K., and Shah, H. (2013) 'Good Machine Performance in Practical Turing Tests'. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games.
• Daly, I., Nasuto, S., and Warwick, K. (2012) 'Brain computer interface control via functional connectivity dynamics'. Pattern Recognition 45 (6), 2123-2136.
• Gasson, M., Kosta, E., Royer, D., Meints, M., and Warwick, K. (2011) 'Normality Mining: Privacy Implications of Behavioral Profiles Drawn from GPS Enabled Mobile Phones'. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man & Cybernetics. Part C: Applications & Reviews 41 (2), 251-261.
• Xydas, D., Downes, J., Spencer, M., Hammond, M., Nasuto, S., Whalley, B., Becerra, V., and Warwick, K. (2011) 'Revealing ensemble state transition patterns in multi-electrode neuronal recordings using hidden Markov models'. IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering 19 (4), 345-355.
• Wu, D., Warwick, K., Ma, Z., Gasson, M., Burgess, J., Pan, S., and Aziz, T. (2010) 'Prediction of Parkinson’s Disease Tremor Onset using Radial Basis Function Neural Network Based on Particle Swarm Optimization'. International Journal of Neural Systems (IJNS) 20 (2), 109-118.
• Hutt, B., and Warwick, K. (2007) 'Synapsing Variable Length Crossover: Meaningful Crossover for Variable Length Genomes'. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation 11 (1), 118-131.
• Warwick, K., Gasson, M., Hutt, B., Goodhew, I., Kyberd, P., Schulzrinne, H., and Wu, X. (2004) 'Thought Communication and Control: A First Step using Radiotelegraphy'. IEE Proceedings: Communications 151 (3), 185-189.
• Warwick, K., Gasson, M., Hutt, B., Goodhew, I., Kyberd, P., Andrews, B., Teddy, P., and Shad, A. (2003) 'The Application of Implant Technology for Cybernetic Systems'. Archives of Neurology 60 (10), 1369-1373.
• Tsypkin, Y.Z., Mason, J.D., Avedyan, E., Warwick, K., and Lewin, I. (1999) 'Neural networks for identification of non-linear systems under random piece-wise polynomial disturbances'. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks 10 (2), 303-312.
• Delgado, A., Kambhampati, C., and Warwick, K. (1995) 'A dynamic recurrent neural network for system identification and control'. IEE Proceedings: Part D: Control Theory and Applications 142 (4), 307-314. 
• Zhu, Q.M., Warwick, K., and Douce, J.L. (1991) 'Adaptive general predictive control for nonlinear systems'. IEE Proceedings: Part D: Control Theory and Applications 138 (1), 33-40.
• Warwick, K. (1987) 'Optimal observers for ARMA models'. International Journal of Control 46 (5), 1493-1503. 
• Warwick, K. (1981) 'Self tuning regulators: a state space approach'. International Journal of Control 33 (5), 839-858.