Albert Uttley

Albert Maurel Uttley (14 August, 1906, London – 13 September, 1985 Bexhill) was an English scientist involved in computing, cybernetics, neurophysiology and psychology. He was a member of the Ratio Club and was the person who suggested its name.

Uttley received both a degree in Psychology and an honours degree in Mathematics from King's College, London, where he also did postgraduate research in visual perception. (He achieved a Ph.D. no later than 1946.)

He was designing conditional-probability neural nets for pattern recognition for the British military. He showed that neural networks with Hebbian learning rules could learn to classify binary sequences.

In the proposal document for the influential 1956 Dartmouth workshop on artificial intelligence, Uttley is one of the researchers noted for his work on neural networks.

Albert was the son of George and Ethel Uttley. He married Gwendoline Lucy Richens.

Publications

"Information, machines, and brains", Trans. of the IRE Professional Group on Information Theory (TIT) 1: 143-149 (1953)

"A theory on the mechanism of learning based on the computation of conditional probabilities", Proceedings of the First International Congress on Cybernetics, Naumur 1956 pp.830-856 Internet Archive copy Internet Archive copy

"The Design of Conditional Probability Computers", Information and Control 2(1): 1-24 (1959)