The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (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. It is recognised by the technical community as a prestigious honour and an important career achievement. Professor Angelov is SCC's first IEEE Fellow and is currently Lancaster University's only academic to be recognised for this distinguished accolade.

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. In relation to Professor Angelov’s achievements, the IEEE stated that, ‘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. He formulated one of the types of fuzzy rule-based models, known as AnYa by the names of the inventors: Angelov and Yager which is a groundbreaking alternative to the two well established types.’

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 has had an impact on everyday life as it makes it possible to extract efficiently useful, understandable information (e.g. in the form of IF…THEN …rules) from vast amounts of complex data possibly streaming online. 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.”

Professor Angelov obtained his PhD back in 1993 from the Bulgarian Academy of Science (BAS). He spent the first ten years of his career as a research fellow in various institutions, including BAS as well as the Catholic University of Leuvain-la-neuve, Belgium; Hans-Knoel Institute, Germany; and Loughborough University, UK. He joined Lancaster University as a Lecturer in 2003. He was visiting professor in various universities and was awarded Chair of Excellence by the Carlos III University, Madrid, Spain and Honorary Professor by the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Professor Angelov is also an inventor with five US patents (one granted; four pending) and he was co-recipient of two ‘The Engineer 2008’ awards (the Special Award and Award for Aerospace and Defense) delivered on 3 October 2008 in The Royal Society, London. He has also been presented with a number of best paper awards as well as an award “In recognition of outstanding service” by the IEEE and INNS (2013, Dallas).

If you would like to learn more about IEEE or the IEEE Fellow Program, please visit www.ieee.org.