Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte

Last updated

Hugh Durrant-Whyte

Born
Hugh Francis Durrant-Whyte

(1961-02-06) 6 February 1961 (age 62)
NationalityBritish and Australian
Alma mater University of Pennsylvania
University of London [2]
Known for Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM)
Awards M. A. Sargent Medal
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions University of Oxford
The University of Sydney
Doctoral students John J. Leonard
Jeffrey Uhlmann [3]
Paul Newman
Website sydney.edu.au/engineering/people/hugh.durrantwhyte.php

Hugh Francis Durrant-Whyte FRS FAA (born 6 February 1961) is a British-Australian engineer and academic. He is known for his pioneering work on probabilistic methods for robotics. The algorithms developed in his group since the early 1990s permit autonomous vehicles to deal with uncertainty and to localize themselves despite noisy sensor readings using simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM).

Contents

Early life and education

Durrant-Whyte was born on 6 February 1961 in London, England. He was educated at Richard Hale School, then a state grammar school in Hertford, Hertfordshire. He studied engineering at the University of London, graduating with a first class Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in 1983. He then moved to the United States where he studied systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania: he graduated with a Master of Science in Engineering (MSE) degree in 1985 and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1986. [1] He was a Thouron Scholar in 1983. [4]

Career and research

From 1986 to 1987, Durrant-Whyte was a BP research fellow in the Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Then, from 1987 to 1995, he was a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, and a university lecturer in engineering science. [1]

In 1995, he accepted a chair at the University of Sydney as Professor of Mechatronic Engineering. [1] He was also director of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) from 1999 to 2002. From 2002 until 2010 he held the position of Research Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems (CAS), a joint venture between the ACFR and mechatronics groups at the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of New South Wales. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2010. Hugh has published more than 350 research papers, graduated more than 70 PhD students, and won numerous awards and prizes for his work. He played a critical role in raising the visibility of Australian robotics internationally and was named "Professional Engineer of the year" (2008) by the Institute of Engineers Australia Sydney Division and NSW "Scientist of the Year" (2010). [5]

Durrant-Whyte is one of the early pioneers of SLAM with John J. Leonard. Durrant-Whyte became the CEO of NICTA on 13 December 2010. He resigned as NICTA CEO on 28 November 2014 citing differences with the Board over future funding arrangements.

He was appointed as the Chief Scientific Adviser at the UK Ministry of Defence on 27 February 2017. [6] As a dual citizen with Australian and British citizenship, Durrant-Whyte was barred from overseeing the UK's nuclear weapons programme. [7]

In May 2018 Durrant-Whyte was appointed NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer by Gladys Berejiklian, NSW Premier. He took up his appointment on 3 September 2018. [8]

Honours and awards

His awards include [2]

Offices held

Government offices
Preceded by Chief Scientific Adviser
to the Ministry of Defence

2017–2018
Succeeded by
Preceded by Chief Scientist & Engineer
for New South Wales

2019–
Incumbent

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NICTA</span>

NICTA was Australia's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research Centre of Excellence and is now known as CSIRO's Data61. The term "Centre of Excellence" is common marketing terminology used by some Australian government organisations for titles of science research groups. NICTA's role was to pursue potentially economically significant ICT related research for the Australian economy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Blake (scientist)</span> British scientist

Andrew Blake FREng, FRS, is a British scientist, former laboratory director of Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft Distinguished Scientist, former director of the Alan Turing Institute, Chair of the Samsung AI Centre in Cambridge, honorary professor at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a leading researcher in computer vision.

Shigeo Hirose is a pioneer of robotics technology and a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Department of Engineering Science, University of Oxford</span> University department in Oxford, England

The Department of Engineering Science is the engineering department of the University of Oxford. It is part of the university's Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division. The department was ranked 3rd best institute in the UK for engineering in the 2021 Research Excellence Framework.

John J. Leonard is an American roboticist and Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Leonard is a researcher in simultaneous localization and mapping, and was the team lead for MIT's team at the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, one of the six teams to cross the finish line in the final event, placing fourth overall.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Toby Walsh</span>

Toby Walsh is Chief Scientist at UNSW.ai, the AI Institute of UNSW Sydney. He is a Laureate fellow, and professor of artificial intelligence in the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales and Data61. He has served as Scientific Director of NICTA, Australia's centre of excellence for ICT research. He is noted for his work in artificial intelligence, especially in the areas of social choice, constraint programming and propositional satisfiability. He has served on the Executive Council on the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hendrik Van Brussel</span> Belgian roboticist

Hendrik (Rik) Van Brussel is a Belgian emeritus professor of mechanical engineering of the KU Leuven, world-renowned for his research on robotics, mechatronics and holonic manufacturing systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Eggleton</span> Australian scientist & academic

Benjamin John Eggleton FAA, FTSE, FOSA, FIEEE, FSPIE, FAIP, FRSN is Pro Vice Chancellor (Research) at the University of Sydney. He is also Professor in the School of Physics where he leads a research group in photonics, nanotechnology and smart sensors and serves as co-director of the NSW Smart Sensing Network (NSSN).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Zelinsky</span>

Alexander ‘Alex’ Zelinsky, is an Australian computer scientist, systems engineer and roboticist. His career spans innovation, science and technology, research and development, commercial start-ups and education. Zelinsky is vice-chancellor and president of the University of Newcastle joining the university in November 2018. He was the Chief Defence Scientist of Australia from March 2012 until November 2018. As Chief Defence Scientist he led defence science and technology for Australia's Department of Defence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michelle Simmons</span> British-Australian quantum physicist

Michelle Yvonne Simmons,, is a Scientia Professor of Quantum Physics in the Faculty of Science at the University of New South Wales and has twice been an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow and is an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow. She is the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation & Communication Technology and is recognised internationally as the creator of the field of atomic electronics. She was the inaugural editor-in-chief of npj Quantum Information, an academic journal publishing articles in the emerging field of quantum information science. On 25 January 2018, Simmons was named as the 2018 Australian of the Year for her work and dedication to quantum information science. On 10 June 2019, Simmons was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours in recognition of her "distinguished service to science education as a leader in quantum and atomic electronics and as a role model."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Albert Zomaya</span>

Albert Y. Zomaya is currently the Chair Professor of High Performance Computing & Networking and Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the School of Information Technologies, The University of Sydney. He is also the Director of the Centre for Distributed and High Performance Computing. He is currently the Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing and Springer's Scalable Computing and Communications. He was past Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Demetri Terzopoulos</span> American professor of computer science

Demetri Terzopoulos is an Academy Award winning Greek-Canadian-American computer scientist, university professor, author, and entrepreneur. He is best known for pioneering the physics-based approach to computer graphics and vision that has helped unify these two fields, and for introducing Deformable Models, among them the seminal Active Contour Models, to graphics, vision, medical imaging, and other domains; he is also known for his artificial life research on realistic animal and human modeling and simulation, encompassing musculoskeletal biomechanics, neuromuscular and neuro-sensorimotor control, and artificial intelligence. He has been a professor of computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and mathematics, and has taught courses in computer graphics, computer vision, scientific computing, and artificial intelligence/life at three universities. He is currently a Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he directs the UCLA Computer Graphics & Vision Laboratory.

David Skellern is an Australian electronic engineer and computer scientist credited, along with colleagues, for the first chip-set implementation of the IEEE 802.11a wireless networking standard.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graeme Jameson</span>

Graeme John Jameson is an engineer, professor and Director of the Centre for Multiphase Processes at the University of Newcastle, Australia, in New South Wales, Australia. He is notable for being the inventor of the Jameson Cell mineral separation device, which he devised in the 1980s. The Jameson Cell uses bubbles to separate super fine particles during mineral processing. It is based on the froth flotation mineral separation process, first invented in 1905.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">J. Michael Brady</span>

Sir John Michael Brady is an emeritus professor of oncological imaging at the University of Oxford. He has been a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, since 1985 and was elected a foreign associate member of the French Academy of Sciences in 2015. He was formerly BP Professor of Information Engineering at Oxford from 1985 to 2010 and a senior research scientist in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1980 to 1985.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alec Cameron (academic)</span>

Alexander (Alec) John Cameron is an Australian engineer and university administrator, currently serving as Vice-Chancellor and President of RMIT University.

Paul Michael Newman is a British engineer and academic, the BP Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford. He is head of the Oxford Mobile Robotics Group (MRG) and CTO at Oxa.

The M. A. Sargent Medal is awarded by Engineers Australia for longstanding eminence in science or the practice of electrical engineering. It is named in honour of Michael Anthony (Mike) Sargent, an outstanding Australian electrical engineer. The medal is the highest award of the Electrical College board of Engineers Australia,

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jan Peters (computer scientist)</span> German computer scientist

Jan Peters is a German computer scientist. He is Professor of Intelligent Autonomous Systems at Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

Roberto Sabatini is an Italian-Australian research engineer and academic specializing in aerospace and defense systems. Currently, he is a full professor at Khalifa University of Science and Technology (UAE) and honorary professor at RMIT University (Australia). Sabatini holds or has held visiting and consulting appointments at a number of institutions, including: Polytechnic University of Turin (Italy); Chosun University ; Durban University of Technology/Space Science Center ; the UAE Space Agency; and the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. Additionally, Sabatini is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society (AESS), Chair of the IEEE AESS Avionics Systems Panel, and Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE AESS

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Anon (2017). "Durrant-Whyte, Prof. Hugh Francis" . Who's Who (online Oxford University Press  ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.251082.(Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. 1 2 "Hugh Durrant-Whyte - Faculty Profile" . Retrieved 30 December 2016.
  3. Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  4. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 14 August 2014. Retrieved 6 February 2012.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  5. World-leading robotics engineer named NSW Scientist of the Year - University of Sydney
  6. "Defence Secretary announces world class innovation panel".
  7. "Australian-UK dual national scientist Hugh Durrant-Whyte barred from nuclear duties". 20 December 2017. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
  8. "New NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer appointed". NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer. 29 May 2018. Retrieved 9 December 2018.