The fellowship was made in recognition of Professor Angelov’s work in the field of artificial intelligence – specifically his contributions to ‘neuro-fuzzy’ and autonomous learning systems.

The IEEE grade of Fellow is the highest grade of membership which is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest.

The IEEE is the world’s leading professional association for advancing technology for humanity. Through its 400,000 members in 160 countries, the IEEE is a leading authority on a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power and consumer electronics.

Speaking about Professor Angelov’s achievements, the IEEE said: “Professor Angelov has made fundamental and lasting contributions to the field of (neuro-) fuzzy systems, and more specifically dynamically evolving intelligent systems. He is a world-leading authority and a pioneer in both areas. He has proposed the overall concept and a series of specific approaches that provide the backbone for the important new research area of evolving intelligent systems.”

Professor Angelov said: “Nowadays, the amount of data produced and stored is growing exponentially, therefore, extracting useful information and learning from these data streams is being widely recognised.

“To avoid or reduce human involvement which makes such systems cheaper, more accessible and in some cases the only possible alternative, new methods and technologies were needed and have been developed recently that are autonomous in the sense of self-developing, self-organising and self-learning.

“These are based on so called neural networks that mimic human brain and fuzzy (as opposed to rigid or deterministic) rule-based systems which are very similar to the way that human reasoning and decision-making takes place. This opens up opportunities for applications in areas such as process industries, but also in cyber security, autonomous video analytics, biomedical, financial and other areas.”