64 Robin Popplestone
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1938
- 2001
POP web page Robin Popplestone was born in Bristol on December 9, 1938. After the war, his family moved to Belfast, where he grew up. He was educated at Belfast University, and received an honors degree in mathematics in 1960. He then spent the next four years at Manchester University doing graduate work in mathematics. One of the widely believed stories surrounding Robin (...although Robin refused to corroborate it...) has it that he never completed his Ph.D. in mathematics because he lost his thesis manuscript in a sailing accident shortly before it would have been delivered to the faculty at Manchester University. Sailing remained a passionate pursuit nonetheless, and though computer science became his profession, mathematics remained at the heart of his research. Robin arrived at Edinburgh University as a Lecturer in 1965 and spent the next 20 years establishing one of the first world-class research groups in Robotics in Europe. He did visionary work in Robotics involving the integration of multi-modal sensing (including vision) into robotic control, and developed techniques for modeling and spatial reasoning about geometric objects. In addition to this work in robotics, he co-developed the programming language PoP-2. This work, which started soon after he arrived in Edinburgh, anticipated functional and higher order programming by over a decade. PoP-2 was the main language used by researchers in Artificial Intelligence in Britain during the 1970’s. While on the faculty at Edinburgh University, he played a major role in keeping the fledging field of Robotics alive in Britain after the Lighthill report on Artificial Intelligence precipitated a major decrease of funding in this area. He had a long history of fostering university and industrial interaction in Edinburgh and served as departmental chairperson in 1981. |
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