Yianni Attikiouzel
ATTIKIOUZEL, Yianni Ioannis John, AM FTSE BSc(hons) PhD FIEEE FIEAust FIEE CPEng CEng (1946-2023)
Yianni Ioannis John Attikiouzel was born on September 4, 1946 in Cairo, son of Evangelos and Ekaterina, and brother of Barbara. He spent his early life in Egypt where he enjoyed riding around the pyramids, and countless museum visits. He always saw Cairo at the time as an exemplar multicultural society that has since been lost in today’s world.
His family sent him to Athens for his schooling and to the UK for higher education. He broke away from the family tradition of medicine and dentistry to become an engineer. The family allowed him two years to prove his ability to persist with engineering. His first two years passed in Halifax, Yorkshire, completing his A-level examinations and learning English. He met his future wife, Linda, in Halifax while both were still teenagers.
It was in Halifax that early signs of leadership became apparent. He organised several student events to help raise funds for local charities.
He completed his BSc, PhD and a three year postdoc research appointment at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He and Linda married there before they moved south for Yianni to start his first lecturing post at Portsmouth Polytechnic, later the University of Portsmouth, in September 1975. He had only been there a week when he received an offer of a lectureship at the University of Western Australia (UWA). He announced “As soon as I saw the latitude of Perth, I knew this was the place to be. Sunshine, here we come!” The difficult decision to relocate so far from their families was, apparently, decided with the toss of a coin. He and Linda arrived in Perth in July 1976.
Yianni built his international reputation through 26 years at UWA. His research achievements enabled rapid promotion to full professor, the uppermost academic level, in only 15 years. Within 10 years of arriving, he was appointed department head for Electrical and Electronic Engineering, a rare achievement. He served as department head for a total of 10 years between 1985 and 1991, and again from 1995 till 1998. He was elected to the University’s Academic Council for 1990 – 1993, and as a staff representative on the University Senate for a three year term from 1993. He also served on many other University policy-making committees.
In 1984-85, he helped to set up the West Australian section for IEEE, the leading international organisation for Electronic Engineering. He served on IEEE regional committees through the late 1980s and 1990s.
Yianni established research in digital signal processing at UWA on his arrival, a new field enabled by the arrival of single chip computers such as the Intel 8080 in the mid-1970s. He was a leader in artificial intelligence research through the 1980s. Following two terms as department head, in 1991 he set up the UWA Centre for Intelligent Information Processing Systems inspiring a cohesive group of researchers that continues today including, among others, Dr. Mike Alder, Prof. Thomas Bräunl, Prof. Gary Bundell, Chris Croft, Dr. Chris Da Silva, Dr. Tyrone Fernando, Prof. Terry Woodings, and Prof. Anthony Zaknich. His vision was to create a centre for research excellence that would bring electrical engineers, doctors and medical scientists together to create practical outcomes. In particular, he foresaw the potential for automation and particularly artificial neural networks in medical diagnosis, instrumentation and regulation of treatments. The centre brought together researchers from electrical, electronics and computer engineering, mathematics, psychology, surgery, pathology, and radiology. They made, and continue to make significant advances in speech recognition, image processing as well as artificial intelligence: the centre continues today under the leadership of Prof. Thomas Bräunl.
Over his career, Yianni attracted more than 6 million dollars of research funding to UWA from agencies such as the Australian Research Council, AusIndustry, West Australian government, Telethon Foundation, C&V Ramaciotti Foundation, ALCOA, Australian Telecommunications Research Board, Australian Diabetic Research Foundation, Australian Computer Research Board, QEII Medical Centre, Cancer Foundation, and WA Lotteries Commission.
In 2000 he set up the Australian Research Centre for Medical Engineering and also the Medical Engineering Research Institute of Australia. He founded the Australian Journal of Intelligent Information Processing Systems in 1994, and the journal continued for 25 years till 2019, providing research papers on artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, fuzzy systems, virtual reality and associated computer science topics. He served as general chair for nine major national and international conferences held in Perth.
Yianni served on the Australian Industry Research and Development Board set up by the Keating government to lift research and development investment by private companies, particularly in manufacturing technologies. He also served on Western Australian government boards encouraging technological investment.
Between 1985 and 1991 he published five books, including an extremely successful series on Pascal Programming.
He developed an automatic insulin infuser for local and Canadian hospitals, working in collaboration with several medical researchers and practitioners. Following on this success, he developed a hormone infuser which was commercialized by Pancretec in San Diego, USA, and used to control dosing of GnRH to artificially induce ovulation in women and help with the treatment of cryptorchidism in boys and men. In Perth alone, around 200 children were born with the help of this machine. He also developed a sperm freezer and a non-invasive blood pressure monitor. All these developments earned significant royalty payments for the University. He helped a computer graphics start-up progress to multi-million dollar venture capital raising. Yianni is named as co-inventor on three patents resulting from these efforts.
Within just a few years of arriving, Yianni was instrumental in establishing joint degree programmes at UWA, particularly Science Engineering and Commerce Engineering. The former attracted a new cadre of high performing students to engineering, and the latter has consistently been one of the most attractive degrees for engineering students, and both have continued to the present day. In 1994, collaborating with James Trevelyan in the Mechanical Engineering department, he helped the first mechatronic engineering degree programme at UWA, the first in Western Australia and one of the first in Australia. He also created the first Biomedical Engineering degree programme in WA. Yianni introduced an entrepreneurship course for students in 1986, relying on external funding to do so. In 2001, he pioneered a unique course, Medical Engineering, delivered jointly by all four public universities in Western Australia. He consistently promoted engineering as an attractive career option for young people.
Yianni's impact on young lives is measured in terms of 26 former PhD research students and thousands of undergraduates influenced by his teaching.
Among the many awards Yianni received through his career, the most significant would be in 1998, when he was admitted as Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to both Electrical and Electronic Engineering and for his contribution to the Greek Community. In 2000, the Institution of Electrical Engineers in the UK awarded Yianni the Sir Lionel Hooke award for his contributions to education and research in electronic engineering, especially for his leadership in multi-discipline research and the application of this research to the solution of problems in medicine. In 2002, the Engineers Australia Colleges of Electrical Engineering and Information, Telecommunications and Electronic Engineering awarded Yianni the M. A. Sargent Medal, the most prestigious award in those disciplines.
In 2002, he was appointed Executive Dean, Division of Science and Engineering at Murdoch University where he led the amalgamation of several small departments into a cohesive School of Engineering Science. He also devolved financial decision-making and responsibility to schools, improving morale and collaboration. He retired in 2008.
As President of the Evangelismos Community he guided the successful development of the church and its parish. He was instrumental in establishing Greek language teaching in many schools in Perth, as well as ensuring the presentation and preservation of several aspects of Greek culture in the wider community. Yianni joined the Modern Greek Syllabus Committee of the WA Secondary Education Authority in 1994, and helped establish Modern Greek as a tertiary entrance subject in WA. From 1997 till 2002, he served as vice-president and president of the Greek Orthodox Community in Western Australia.
After retiring he had the freedom to be able to devote himself to his favourite pastimes - fishing and crabbing, both of which he approached with the level of meticulousness he had always applied to any professional task. Minding his olives, lemons, and figs, and experimenting with them, occupied many hours. The much loved dogs were delighted with his presence at home.
Many years earlier, when visiting Greece, he had been shown some texts, written in classical Greek, and had been asked to translate them into English. He had promised to do that, and over ten years in retirement, Yianni translated these works, resulting in several books:
- What We Should Know Before We Depart Earth: The Purpose of Earthly Life,
- So You Want To Go To Heaven: The Purpose of Earthly Life,
- Spiritualism and Spiritual Enlightenment: The Purpose of Earthly Life,
- The Past, Present and Future: The Purpose of Earthly Life,
- Confucian Anthology, and
- Socratic Anthology and Psycho-Spiritual Entities.
Yianni died on 29th November 2023, aged 77 years. In recognition of Yianni’s love of ancient Greece, he was buried in Athens.
Compiled by Emeritus Professor James Trevelyan and Linda Attikiouzel.
Yianni’s research publications can be found at the following sites:
Murdoch University Research Repository, retrieved June 8, 2024
Yianni Attikiouzel's ResearchGate Pages
References:
UWA casts net for prospective engineers. The Australian, 25 March 1998 p44
Robot Walks Tall For UWA. The West Australian, 29 July 1998 p27
Business Moves. The West Australian, 18 May 2002
