Professor Blair Thornton PhD
Professor of Marine Autonomy

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Blair Thornton is a Professor of Marine Autonomy within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton
Research Keywords: Marine Robotics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, SLAM, Laser spectroscopy
Blair Thornton is a Professor of Marine Autonomy within Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton. He currently holds an EPSRC innovation fellowship for Robotics and Artificial Intelligence systems for ocean research, and is a Co-Director of the FEPS In situ and Remote Intelligent Sensing Centre of Excellence (IRIS).
His research develops scalable methods for robotic seafloor survey through improved sensing and autonomy. He is dedicated to fielding systems in real environments and overcoming bottlenecks in the flow of information from data collection through to human insight.
After graduating from ship-science in 2002, Blair went on to complete his PhD in underwater robotics at Southampton in 2006. During his PhD, he spent 2 years at the URA laboratory, Institute of Industrial Science (IIS) at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and continued his research as a government funded postdoctoral fellow. In 2008, he was appointed Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012. He rejoined the University of Southampton in 2016. During this time, he has participated in more than 55 ocean research expeditions (30 of which as principal investigator) and spent over 500 days at sea.
He is an associate editor for the IEEE/Journal of Oceanic Engineering, IEEE/Robotics and Automation Letters, and a Guest Editor on the Field Robotics Journal Marine Robotics Special Issue. He was awarded the Okamura Kenji prize for outstanding contribution to marine technology in 2014 for his contribution to seafloor debris and radiation monitoring following the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster in the Tohoku region of Japan.
In 2019, he was awarded 2nd place in the Shell Ocean Discovery Xprize as a founding member of Team KUROSHIO.