Paul Newman (engineer)
Paul Newman FREng (born 1973)[1] is a British engineer and academic, the BP Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford.[2] He is head of the Oxford Mobile Robotics Group (MRG)[2] and CTO at Oxbotica.
Newman received an MEng in Engineering Science from Balliol College, Oxford in 1995, followed by a PhD in autonomous navigation from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney, Australia.[3]
In 2014, he co-founded Oxbotica with Ingmar Posner.[3]
Career and Research
Newman’s work on autonomous vehicle technology has led him to author 200 papers and garner over 15,000 citations.[3] He has an h-index of 72 according to Google Scholar.[4] In his doctoral dissertation at the University of Sydney, Paul set out the fundamentals of the large-scale navigation problem SLAM, which would later become one of the most cited papers in the field at over 3,000 citations.[3]
Following his PhD in 1999 under Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte,[1][5] Newman worked as a Navigation Engineer at Sonardyne International, UK, in 1999 and 2000, where he wrote the navigation algorithms which underpinned operation of autonomous sub-sea vehicles dealing with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.[6]
In 2003, Newman left industry for MIT, where he was a postdoctorate research scientist, working with Professor John J. Leonard on large-scale field robotics both on land and in the ocean.[3]
He became a Departmental Lecturer in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford in 2003,[3] and set up the Mobile Robotics Group, a sub-division of the Oxford Robotics Institute, where he developed partnerships with BAE Systems and Nissan.[7] In 2005, he was appointed to a University Lectureship in Information Engineering and elected a fellow of New College Oxford where he was a Tutorial Fellow until 2012.[8] He became Professor of Engineering Science in 2010 and BP Professor of Information Engineering and Fellow of Keble College in 2012.
In 2010, Newman was awarded an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship.[8] The flagship output was the “Robotcar”, which in 2013 became the first autonomous vehicle permitted on public roads in the UK.[7]
He founded the Oxford Robotics Institute in 2016 and served as director until 2022.
In 2014, Newman leveraged the newly developed technology and, with the Robotcar team, co-founded Oxbotica.[9]
Advisory Roles and Fellowships
Newman was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Fellow of the IEEE in 2014, both with citations for "outstanding contributions to robot navigation".[3]
He served on the UK Government’s Department for Transport Scientific Advisory Council from 2016 to 2020.[3]
From 2020 Newman has served as a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology.
References
- Kenward, Michael (2015). "Instilling robots with lifelong learning: Professor Paul Newman FREng" (PDF). Ingenia. No. 65. Royal Academy of Engineering. Retrieved 17 November 2022.
- "Paul Newman - Homepage : Main - Home Page browse". Robots.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 27 June 2017.
- "Paul Newman – Oxford Robotics Institute". Ori.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 27 June 2017.
- "Paul Newman". Google Scholar. Retrieved 11 January 2023.
- "Paul Newman". The Mathematics Genealogy Project. Retrieved 17 November 2022.
- Campbell, Peter (17 March 2017). "Oxbotica unlocks the potential of driverless cars". Financial Times. Retrieved 24 April 2019.
- "8 things about Oxford's driverless tech | University of Oxford". www.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 24 April 2019.
- "Professor Paul Newman FREng — Keble College". www.keble.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 24 April 2019.
- Balch, Oliver (13 April 2017). "Driverless cars will make our roads safer, says Oxbotica co-founder". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 24 April 2019.