Paul Newman (engineer)

Paul Michael Newman CBE FREng (born 1973^[1]) is a British engineer and academic who founded the Oxford Robotics Institute.^[2] He is the BP Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford,^[3] and head of the Oxford Mobile Robotics Group (MRG).^[3]

In 2014, he co-founded Oxa with Ingmar Posner,^[4] noted for developing the first self-driving cars on British roads.^[5]

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.^[4]

Newman’s work on autonomous vehicle technology has led him to author 200 papers and garner over 15,000 citations.^[4] He has an h-index of 72 according to Google Scholar.^[6] In his doctoral dissertation at the University of Sydney, Newman 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.^[4]

Following his PhD in 1999 under Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte,^[1][7] 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.^[8]

In 2000, Newman left industry for MIT, where he was a postdoctoral research scientist, working with Professor John J. Leonard on large-scale field robotics both on land and in the ocean.^[4]

He became a Departmental Lecturer in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford in 2003,^[4] and set up the Mobile Robotics Group where he developed partnerships with BAE Systems and Nissan.^[9] 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.^[10] He became Professor of Engineering Science at New College, in 2010,^[5] and BP Professor of Information Engineering and Fellow of Keble College in 2012.^[10]

In 2010, Newman was awarded an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship.^[10] The flagship output was the “Robotcar”, which, in 2013, became the first autonomous vehicle permitted on public roads in the UK.^[9] In 2014, Newman, with the newly developed technology and the Robotcar team, co-founded spin-out Oxbotica, later renamed to Oxa.^[10][5][11]

He founded the Oxford Robotics Institute in 2016 and served as director until 2022.^[12]

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".^[4]

He served on the UK Government’s Department for Transport Scientific Advisory Council from 2016 to 2020.^[4]

From 2020 Newman has served as a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology.^[5][12]

He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2023 Birthday Honours for services to technology and engineering.^[13]