Bob Dobinson (1943-2004)

Bob Dobinson died, very unexpectedly, in England on Thursday 19th February. Bob came to CERN as a NATO Fellow in April 1968, directly after gaining his PhD in London. He joined the CERN-Rome Group, carrying out experiments both at the CERN PS and at Serpukhov. He became a CERN fellow before being appointed as a Staff Member in 1971. His professional interests were always in the area of electronics, instrumentation, networking and computing at the "front-end" of experiments. In that context, mention must be made of his outstanding work in driving the CAMAC standard, and his later work on FASTBUS; of his leadership of the European Muon Collaboration's online team and of his support, as a user, for standard PDP-11 data acquisition software; of his interest in Ethernet at all times from its very initial use to inter-connect computers to his latest work with the Gigabit and 10 Gigabit versions as the basis for data transmission within experiments. Bob lived life the way he wanted to, and with great energy. He drove himself hard and generated enthusiasm amongst his collaborators to do the same. Always willing to learn from first principles about topics that interested him, he persisted with questions until he had obtained a full understanding. That made him a first-class teacher, and he held positions as Visiting Professor at the Universities of Liverpool and London. It also made him a really excellent research supervisor, and he was supervising six PhD students at the time of his death. From 1983-1987 he was on leave of absence from CERN, initially at the University of Illinois, and then as leader of the Electronics Group at TRIUMF in Vancouver, where he was also an Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria. He was one of the first people at CERN to understand the interest of the European Union's Framework Programme for funding developments reaching beyond those that could be funded from the laboratory's baseline budget. GP-MIMD, Harmony, Macramé, ARCHES, SWIFT and ESTA are all EU-funded projects in which he was heavily involved (and some of which he led), with transputers, switching fabrics and Ethernet being the core technologies that interested him. He was highly respected as an expert in these areas by both academia and industry, and thus made very real contributions to technology transfer over many years. He had been working on ATLAS Trigger and Data Acquisition since 1995 where he played an essential role in developing the design of the overall system, bringing his extensive experience in computer networking to bear. He recognised at an early stage that Gigabit Ethernet was the right technology for the task, and went on to develop these ideas through prototyping, computer modelling and technology evaluation, leading with great energy and enthusiasm a team of younger colleagues. In this work he exploited fully the common interests of ATLAS and externally funded R&D projects to their mutual benefit. He had a broad understanding of the T/DAQ project, working closely with the project management who relied strongly on his advice. The T/DAQ system that will be built for ATLAS reflects important contributions that he has made. Away from work, he was a keen sportsman; on the squash court, walking up hills and mountains, and skiing, barely pausing for the rest of us to catch up with him. He especially enjoyed playing his different guitars. Always generous, he was a devoted father to his two children. To his family and to his close friends and colleagues we offer our sincere condolences on this immensely sad occasion. Friends and colleagues from CERN and the Atlas Collaboration

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