Blair Thornton is a Professor of Marine Autonomy specialising in robotic sensing, autonomy 
and intelligent data processing to support of marine science, statutory monitoring, 
infrastructure inspection and disaster response. He leads Ocean Perception within 
the Maritime Robotics and Instrumentation Lab, and holds an adjunct position at the 
Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo. He has 20 years of international 
experience and previously held an EPSRC fellowship in robotics and autonomous systems in 
extreme environments. During this time he has spent over 500 days at sea on more than 50 
expeditions surveying marine minerals, monitoring radiation, and inspecting offshore wind, 
sub-sea communication cables and decommissioned infrastructure. His research interest is 
in addressing bottlenecks in the flow of information between data collection through to 
generation of human insight through the use of intelligence enabled workflows