Abstract
Computer Technology has advanced spectacularly since the first program was executed by
the Manchester ‘Baby' machine on June 21 1948, but if this progress is to be sustained there
are major challenges ahead in the area of transistor predictability and reliability and in the
exploitation of massively-parallel computing resources. Biology has solved both of these
problems, but we don't understand how those solutions function at the level of information
processing. Two questions arise from this line of thinking:
- can massively-parallel computers be used to accelerate our understanding of brain
function?
- can our growing understanding of brain function point the way to more efficient,
fault-tolerant computation?
While these questions remain so far unanswered, they suggest a line of investigation that
has been recognised under the Grand Challenge of ‘Building Brains'.

Biography
Steve Furber is the ICL Professor of Computer Engineering in the School of Computer Science
at the University of Manchester. He received his B.A. degree in Mathematics in 1974 and his
Ph.D. in Aerodynamics in 1980 from the University of Cambridge. From 1980 to 1990 he worked
in the hardware development group within the R&D department at Acorn Computers Ltd, and
was a principal designer of the BBC Microcomputer and the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor.
At Manchester he leads the Advanced Processor Technologies research group. He is a Fellow
of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the BCS, the IET and the IEEE, and a
member of Academia Europaea. His awards include a Royal Academy of Engineering Silver
Medal, the IET Faraday Medal and a CBE.

The Dennis Gabor lecture is an annual College lecture held in the Faculty of Engineering. Dennis Gabor (1900-79) is celebrated for his invention in holography, which he discovered by accident whilst working to improve the electron microscope. He discovered that two electron images could be combined and lit optically to create a three-dimensional image. This idea remained theoretical until the invention of lasers in the 1960s, which allowed his theory to be put into practice. As a result, Gabor was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971 and described himself as "one of the few lucky physicists who could see an idea of theirs grow into a sizeable chapter of physics". Holograms have many application even today and are used on credit cards, for research and in medicine. From 1948 Gabor was Reader in Electron Physics in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Imperial College London where he continued his work on holography with his students. He later became Professor of Applied Electron Physics, and stayed at Imperial even after his retirement in 1967 as a Senior Research Fellow.

Pre lecture tea and coffee will be served from 17.00.

To register your attendance please email amanda.cerny@imperial.ac.uk