Common ground

Professor John Robinson is one of 2,400 participants in artist Anthony Gormley's Trafalgar Square plinth art form adventure, One & Other*. Professor Robinson is Head of the Department of Electronics at the University of York and his theme was a broad overview of the importance of engineering, describing engineers as people who "try to make things better". He then went into depth about his specialist subject: that of image recognition, taking as the specific subject various works of art from the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery as test images for software that detects and describes faces. The software is able to judge the 'beauty' and 'trustworthiness' of a face, with the Mona Lisa said to have beauty 'slightly below average' and Henry VIII to be 'quite ugly'. Out of the 200 images sampled, Lord Nelson was one of the 'most beautiful' – a piece of serendipity, as Nelson was on his column looking down on the Professor. This is not, however, the major aspect of the research with which he has recently been involved. On his website, it is written thus: "Face Image Processing - A new scheme for covariance matrix regularization gives excellent results when applied to appearance-based face processing. Using conditional density estimation, 3D face structure can be recovered from mugshots without explicit modelling of shape". So, automatic 3D models from 2D images. Taking that description of his project, the more frivolous 'good looking, ugly, trustworthy, untrustworthy' theme was probably the best choice for the exhibit, in terms of connecting with the public, rather than going into the science and detail of the work that underpins it, explaining how it works in detail. But he also showed himself to be a 'typical engineer ': one interested in finding out how things work, by pulling apart every gadget he had with him, including a running laptop. This is, perhaps, the most universally shared attribute of an engineer – I plead guilty. And it is certainly a common element among others I meet. They have an interest in inanimate objects – cars, motorbikes, computers, gadgets – and they have taken or do take them apart (putting them back together again, of course). They may also have an interest in the 'How Stuff Works' programmes that appear on The Discovery Channel (http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/how-stuff-works/how-stuff-works.html), or, indeed, National Geographic's Mega Structures (www.natgeochannel.co.uk/Programmes/megastructures). But on the core element of an inquisitive nature that sees engineers wanting to understand how things work, I have recently been to a couple of press conferences where short cartoons concentrating on this very aspect have been used in a self-deprecating, knowing, 'this is who we are' manner. For those interested, one of them, a Dilbert example, can be found here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOtoujYOWw0. While Professor Robinson's image- processing demonstration showed him to be a particularly specialised engineer, it was his technically inquisitive nature that demonstrated that he inhabits the common ground that seems to link many others of our ilk. * Anthony Gormley is asking the people of the UK to occupy the empty Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square in London, a space normally reserved for statues of kings and generals. In the process, they will become an image of themselves and a representation of the whole of humanity. Every hour, 24 hours a day, for 100 days without a break, a different person will make the Plinth their own (from 6 July to 14 October). Live webcam http://www.oneandother.co.uk – Professor Robinson's effort can be viewed here http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/John_R. First published in Machinery September 2009