Owen Holland, Professor and Head of Research in the Department of Computer Science at Essex University, UK, has over 15 years of experience in biologically inspired robotics and computation. He has been working in the area of machine consciousness since 2000, first at the California Institute of Technology, and later at the legendary Starlab. He was one of the organisers of the first international workshop on the subject (http://www.swartzneuro.org/banbury_e.asp) and edited a recent collection of papers on the theme (Machine Consciousness, Imprint Academic, 2003). He is the principal investigator for the first major project in the area, 'Machine Consciousness through Internal Modelling'), funded with £491,000 from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. (For more information on machine consciousness, see www.machineconsciousness.org)