Dr Julian Ryde is a Staff Scientist, Intelligent Robotic Systems, working at the United Technologies Research Center since 2013, with a stint as Chief Scientific Officer for a construction robotics startup. With over 35 peer-reviewed journal, conference publications and book chapters published, his research focuses on perception for mobile autonomous systems particularly, localization and mapping from ranging and imaging sensors. In addition, he is also investigating perceptual simulation for enhanced autonomous intelligence. Ryde is an alumni of Cambridge University where he earned his BA Honors in Natural Science and MSci in Physics. Following was a PhD in Mobile Robotics from the University of Essex on ‘Cooperative 3D Mapping and Localisation of Multiple Mobile Robots’. Throughout his PhD, he developed data structures suitable for probabilistic representation of the environment surrounding a robot and produced a multi-robot system capable of mapping indoor environments in full 3D in real-time. Following his PhD he joined the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) as a Post-Doctoral Fellow where he worked with the Autonomous System Lab focusing on the automation of mining equipment; this work was published in Journal of Autonomous Robots in 2010. He has worked within the DARPA Mind’s Eye project developing smart cameras for human activity recognition and description and was the Co-Investigator on the Advanced Emergency Response project sponsored by the Federal Highway administration.