Paul Newman

Paul Michael Newman (born 1973 ) is a British engineer and academic who founded the Oxford Robotics Institute. He is the BP Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Keble College, Oxford, and head of the Oxford Mobile Robotics Group (MRG). noted for developing the first self-driving cars on British roads. 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. 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.

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. 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. He became Professor of Engineering Science at New College, in 2010, and BP Professor of Information Engineering and Fellow of Keble College in 2012.

He founded the Oxford Robotics Institute in 2016 and served as director until 2022.

Honours, 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".