Plamen P. Angelov

Also known as Plamen Parvanov Angelov

Plamen P. Angelov is a computer scientist at Lancaster University who works on evolving intelligent systems and explainable deep learning. He took his PhD in 1993, was named an IEEE Fellow in 2015 for contributions to neuro-fuzzy and autonomous learning systems, served as Vice-President of the International Neural Networks Society from 2017 to 2020, and became a Fellow of ELLIS in 2019. With Eduardo Soares, he posted the xDNN paper in 2019, describing a prototype-based deep neural network with an explainable internal architecture, and he received the 2020 Dennis Gabor Award in July 2021 for contributions to engineering applications of neural networks. He holds a Chair in Intelligent Systems at Lancaster, leads its AI group, and is founding Director of the LIRA centre.

Now at: School of Computing and Communications, Pi School and European Space Agency
Born: 1966
Works: 570
Citations: 14,799
h-index: 60
Rankings: #73 by first-author papers
Badges: Wayfarer
Loyal

Years link to their sources. Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 22 October 2026.

Timeline

1993–1997

A PhD and a Louvain fellowship

He completes his PhD in 1993. In 1997, he is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.
2009–2012

Evolving Systems and IEEE standards

He becomes founding co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Evolving Systems in 2009. From 2010 to 2012, he chairs the Standards Committee of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society and initiates the first IEEE standard in computational intelligence, standard 1855-2016.
2015

Named an IEEE Fellow

In December 2015, Lancaster University announces that he is named an IEEE Fellow for his contributions to neuro-fuzzy and autonomous learning systems. The IEEE statement describes his work on dynamically evolving intelligent systems.
2017–2020

Vice-President of INNS

He serves two terms as Vice-President of the International Neural Networks Society from 2017 to 2020.
2019

ELLIS Fellow and Program Director

He becomes a Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) in 2019. He serves as a Program Director of the ELLIS Human-centric Machine Learning programme.
2019–2020

The xDNN explainable network

In December 2019, he and Eduardo Soares post the paper Towards Explainable Deep Neural Networks (xDNN) on arXiv, and it appears in the journal Neural Networks in 2020. xDNN is a prototype-based network that needs very little computing power and trains in seconds without GPUs.
2021

The Dennis Gabor Award

He receives the 2020 Dennis Gabor Award at the International Joint Conference on Neural Networks in July 2021, for contributions to engineering applications of neural networks. The announcement credits him with developing the interpretable xDNN with his PhD students.
As of October 2026

Chair in Intelligent Systems

He holds a Chair in Intelligent Systems at Lancaster University, leads the AI group of the School of Computing and Communications, and is founding Director of the LIRA centre. He serves as the School's Director of Research from 2020 to 2025. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Pi School and the Φ-lab of the European Space Agency for 2025–2027.