Max B. Clowes

Timeline

1. 1933–1959

   A physics PhD at Reading

   He is born in 1933 and earns a PhD in physics at the University of Reading, supervised by R. W. Ditchburn. In 1959, the two publish a paper on an improved apparatus for producing a stabilized retinal image.

2. 1959–1967

   Character recognition at NPL

   From 1959 to 1963, he works at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington with John Parks and David Yates, and he and Parks publish a paper on a new technique in character recognition in 1961. He then moves to the MRC Psycho-linguistics Research Unit at Oxford, where he writes "Perception, picture processing and computers" for Machine Intelligence 1 in 1967.

3. 1964

   Starting the AISB study group

   In 1964, he starts a Study Group on Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) within the British Computer Society; the name is his pun, "A is B". The group grows into the AISB society, which later expands to a European society.

4. 1969

   From Canberra to Sussex

   At the Computing Research Section of CSIRO in Canberra, he writes the foreword and three papers for the Picture Language Machines conference held there in February 1969. Stuart Sutherland, a colleague from Oxford, now heads experimental psychology at Sussex, and Clowes returns to the UK in 1969 for a readership in that laboratory. In 1969, the philosopher Aaron Sloman learns about AI from him.

5. 1969–1973

   IJCAI trustee and general chair

   He serves as an IJCAI trustee from 1969 to 1973. He has an organising role at the second IJCAI, held at Imperial College London in 1971, and is general chair of IJCAI-73.

6. 1971

   Huffman–Clowes line labelling

   In 1971, he publishes "On Seeing Things" in the journal Artificial Intelligence, introducing a line-labelling scheme for pictures of polyhedra that David Huffman discovers independently. Known as Huffman–Clowes labelling, the idea is later extended by David Waltz and by Geoffrey Hinton. In his vision work he also defends the slogan "Perception is controlled hallucination".

7. 1973–1980

   Professor of AI at Sussex

   In 1973, he takes a chair in AI on the arts and social studies side of Sussex, becoming Professor of Artificial Intelligence, probably the first person in the world with that title, and helps start the Cognitive Studies Programme with Margaret Boden, Alistair Chalmers and Aaron Sloman. From 1975, he, Steve Hardy and Sloman develop the Sussex POP11 teaching system, and he teaches the "Computers and Thought" course for humanities and social science students. Alan Mackworth is among his research students.

8. 1980–1981

   A schools computing project

   In December 1980, he leaves Sussex to join a project on computing in schools. He dies of a heart attack in April 1981.