Robin Forrest

Robin Forrest

Professor

  • 3.04 Sciences

Personal profile

Areas of Expertise

Computational geometry; computer graphics; human-computer interaction; scientific visualisation.

Career

Robin worked with Steve Coons as a Visiting Research Fellow at M.I.T. Project MAC in 1967 and as a Visiting Professor at Syracuse University in 1971-72. He moved to the University of East Anglia in 1974 as a Reader and became a Professor in 1980. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Utah and the University of Sao Paulo, SP, a Visiting Expert at the Beijing Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a Visiting Scientist at Xerox PARC. He is an Honorary Professor of Shandong University.

He has consulted for General Motors, Boeing, Lockheed, Xerox, Digital, Apple, Philips, Adobe, Rolls-Royce and others and has worked for the defense in various patent cases concerning computer painting systems. Having written the first published paper on Computational Geometry in 1971, he formed the Computational Geometry Project (sometimes called the Computer Graphics Project and known for short as CGP) at UEA in 1974.

Academic Background

Robin Forrest graduated in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Edinburgh and moved to Cambridge where, inspired by a seminar by Ivan Sutherland, he became a founder-member of the Computer-Aided Design Group in 1965.

He gained his Ph.D. (Curves and Surfaces for Computer-Aided Design) in 1968.

Key Research Interests

The consequences of the discrete nature of digital computing for computer graphics and computational geometry:

  • sampling and quantisation effects
  • anti-aliasing
  • consistency and robustness of geometric computation
  • applied computational geometry
  • point-based modelling
  • dynamic shape modelling
  • Non-immersive virtual reality and the enhancement of visualisation through the use of sound and touch

Recent papers are available in Acrobat format from:
ftp://ftp.cmp.uea.ac.uk/pub/forrest

Single page posters formatted for A4 as PostScript Level 2 ASCII files are also found in the same directory. Please read the ReadMe as some require printing in colour or at 600+dpi 

Teaching Interests

Completed PhD Students:

Terry Palmer (Consultant, Norwich), Rick Rolph, Dave Earl (Harlequin), Ahmed Nasri (American University of Beirut), AdrianGeisow (Hewlett-Packard Labs., Bristol), Qun-Sheng Peng (State Key Lab.of CAD and CG, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou), Matthew Chalmers (University of Glasgow), Andy Day(UEA), Rosane Minghim (University of Sao Paulo, Sao Carlos), Antonio Fabris (University of Sao Paulo, IME, Sao Paulo), Rob Hughes (Animotion Ltd., Pinewood), Marcus Tutt (TeleVirtual, Norwich), Ashley Howes all at UEA.