Peter Mowforth Explained

Peter Heward Mowforth
Birth Date:1953 10, df=yes[1]
Birth Place:Sheffield, England[2]
Nationality:British
Education:University of CambridgeUniversity of Sheffield
Occupation:Businessman
Known For:Ecommerce, AI, Robotics, Computer Vision
Spouse:Gillian Mowforth
Children:Joss and Lara
Parents:Cyril Mowforth, Olga Mowforth[3]

Peter Mowforth (born 27 October 1953) is a British businessman, ecommerce specialist and Chief Executive of INDEZ Ltd,[4] an ecommerce agency based in Scotland. Formerly a Machine Learning, Robotics and Artificial Intelligence research scientist who co-founded the Turing Institute.[5] [6] He setup and ran the First Robot Olympics.[7]

Early life and education

Peter Mowforth was born in Sheffield, England on 27 October 1953. From Henley Grammar School, he went on to study Neurophysiology and Physics in London. With Royal Society funding he moved to the University of Cambridge to research early visual perception mechanisms with Professor Horace Barlow FRS.[8] Mowforth gained a PhD from the University of Sheffield on the theory and psychophysics of stereo vision.

Career

He joined the University of Edinburgh's Department of Machine Intelligence & Perception in 1982 to study the application of machine learning to robot vision.[9]

Following new funding from the US in response to Japan's Fifth Generation project,[10] Mowforth along with Professor Donald Michie and Tim Niblett, Mowforth jointly founded the Turing Institute[11] named in memory of Alan Turing who had worked alongside Michie at Bletchley Park.[12] The Institute then moved from Edinburgh to Glasgow. It formed a partnership with the University of Strathclyde where Mowforth held an honorary lectureship.[13]

In 1990, Mowforth founded the First Robot Olympics.[14] The event ran from 27 to 28 September, involved teams from 12 different countries in a variety of competitions, had over 2,500 visitors and is features in the Guinness Book of Records.

He was Director of the British Machine Vision Association (1991-1993)[15] where he organised and ran the British Machine Vision Conference in 1991.[16]

After the dissolution of the Turing Institute, Mowforth co-founded INDEZ, in 1995.

Mowforth provides advice to the Scottish Government on matters concerned with ecommerce and trade.[17]

Research

Mowforth's PhD research conceived a Multi-Scale Signal Matching (MSSM) approach to match stereo pairs of images using a Gaussian Pyramid.[18] This approach was then tested using psychophysics to measure the human vergence eye response.[19]

The MSSM software platform for matching images evolved over the next decade where it was used for a variety of commercial applications including 3D stereo reconstruction,[20] GIS,[21] surgical planning for Maxillo-Facial reconstruction,[22] dental archiving, Data Fusion,[23] MRI image labelling[24] and navigation for mobile robotics.[25]

In 1983, Mowforth was part of the machine learning team that worked on the NASA space shuttle auto-lander project. The system used a structured version of the ID3 Machine Learning system using training examples created using a numerical model of the shuttle.[26]

At the Turing Institute Mowforth was involved with a series of advanced robotics projects[27] [28] including robot navigation, robot sensing and using robots to learn the naïve physics of handling objects through random play.[29]

Media Appearances

In 1990, Mowforth was interviewed by Lorraine Kelly on TV-am about the First Robot Olympics and the future of robotics.[30]

After the death of his parents he shared their letters sent during the Second World War with a local Historical Association, which led to significant media interest and television appearances, including on The One Show.[31] The letters were adapted into an 8-part podcast series.[32] [33]

He has written extensively on business matters focussed on the importance of ecommerce for the purpose of trade.[34]

Personal life

Mowforth lives at Heatherbank House, Milngavie, Glasgow.

Notes and References

  1. Web site: About Dr Peter Heward Mowforth . . Company Check . 5 March 2024.
  2. Book: McGhee . J. . Grimble . M. J. . Mowforth . P. . 1990 . Knowledge-based Systems for Industrial Control . London . Peter Peregrinus Ltd . About the Authors . 978-0-86341-221-9 .
  3. Web site: Good Evening Sweetheart: real-life romance of young couple separated by WWII . Historical Association . 2 July 2019 . 5 March 2024.
  4. Web site: INDEZ LTD overview - Find and update company information . 2024-08-01 . find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk . en.
  5. Web site: Montealegre . Angelica Agredo . 2018 . Historic Government policy on artificial intelligence in the United Kingdom . Houses of Parliament; Publications and Records.
  6. Web site: Jeevanandam . Nivash . 2022 . AI Insights - Traversing the Turing Institute . Indiaai: Indian Government website.
  7. News: Willard . Tim . July 17, 1991 . No Relay Race on This Olympic Field . Los Angeles Times.
  8. News: Donald . Colin . 2014 . Connected: the scientist whose life inspires a major new film, an obscure research unit in Scotland, flying the space shuttle and the invention of the internet . The Glasgow Herald.
  9. Mowforth . Peter . 1986 . Some applications with inductive expert system shells . Turing Institute Research Memo TIOP-86-002 . The Turing Institute.
  10. Montgomery . Penni . 1988 . An overview of contract research at the Turing Institute . Artificial Intelligence in Engineering . 3 . 1 . 46-48 . Elsevier Science Direct.
  11. Web site: Donald . Colin . 16 November 2014 . Connected: the scientist whose life inspires a major new film, an obscure research unit in Scotland, flying the space shuttle and the invention of the internet . The Herald (Glasgow).
  12. Web site: Wright . Matt . 9 March 2020 . Donald Michie (1923-2007): ‘Duckmouse’, a modern-day polymath . British Library Science Blog.
  13. Web site: Pike . Rachel . 2012 . The Turing Institute .
  14. Gavaghan . Helen . 1990 . Mechanical athletes totter towards Olympic glory . New Scientist . New Scientist.
  15. Web site: Peter Heward Mowforth Appointments . Companies House UK.
  16. Book: Mowforth, Peter (Ed.) . British Machine Vision Conference . 1991 . Springer-Verlag . 1991 . 3-540-19715-X . University of Glasgow.
  17. News: 2022 . Scottish Government Economy & Fair Work Committee . Scottish Government Select Committee.
  18. Book: Mowforth, Peter . Vergence Eye Movement Control . April 1982 . University of Sheffield . University of Sheffield.
  19. Mowforth, Peter (1982) "Vergence Eye Movement Control", PhD Thesis, University of Sheffield, UK
  20. Web site: Urquhart . Colin . 1997 . PhD Thesis: The Active Stereo Probe: The Design and Implementation of an Active Videometrics System . Core.ac.uk.
  21. Mowforth . Peter . 1992 . Data Conversion for GIS . IAPR: Workshop on Machine Vision Applications . 403--406 . dblp.org.
  22. Mowforth . P.H. . Ayoub . Ashraf . 1995 . 3D imaging system for clinical applications . Medical Electronics . 59-63 . 59-63 . Enlighten.
  23. Mowforth . Peter . Shapiro . Jonathan . 1990 . 3D Data fusion for a mobile robot . IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) . IEEE.
  24. Mowforth . Peter . 1990 . Model Based Tissue Differentiation in MR Brain Images . The Neuroradiology Journal . 3 . 1 . Sage Journals.
  25. Mowforth . Peter . 1992 . Towards an active perception . Image and Vision Computing . 10 . 7 . 466 . Elsevier Science Direct.
  26. Singla . S . Malik . H . 2019 . Space Shuttle Landing Control Using Supervised Machine Learning . Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing Applications of Artificial Intelligence Techniques in Engineering . 697 . 349-356 . Springer.
  27. McClelland . Stephen . 1987 . Advanced robotics: the view from the Turing . Industrial Robot . 14 . 1 . 33-36 . MCB.
  28. Mowforth . Peter . Bratko . Ivan . 1987 . AI and Robotics; Flexibility and Integration . Robotica . 5 . 2 . 93-98 . Cambridge University Press.
  29. Zrimec . Tatjana . 1991 . Learning by an autonomous agent in the pushing domain . Robotics and Autonomous Systems . 8 . 1-2 . 19-29 . Elsevier Science Direct.
  30. TV-AM on YouTube, "Lorraine Kelly interviewing Peter Mowforth about the Robot Olympics", Jan 5, 2013
  31. Web site: 2017 . BBC: The One Show; Good Evening Sweetheart . Youtube.
  32. Web site: 2020 . Letters of Love in WW2 . Apple: Podcasts.
  33. News: Davidson . Marie . 2010 . Glasgow & West Scotland Branch: Good Evening Sweetheart . Historical Association: The Voice for History.
  34. News: Mowforth . Peter . 2024 . Why Scotland needs to get on board the e-commerce express . The Glasgow Herald . 8.

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