Geoff Robinson
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Geoff Robinson of CSIRO Mathematics, Informatics and Statistics
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Geoff Robinson says that he’s always had a fascination with solving
problems.
“As a kid, I loved those books of problems, I always found those
fascinating,” he says, “and I liked maths at school because it was
all about problems.”
When he got to university, however, Geoff says, it became all about
mathematics.
“It appeared to me to be about solving well posed problems for
which there is an absolute right answer,” so, he explains, he
discovered statistics, enjoying its objectives of “trying to make
progress in areas where there is a lot of uncertain issues about
variability and what you don’t know and what you can’t measure
properly.”
Geoff enjoys dealing in uncertainty, he says, “because there’s a
lot of interesting problems with how people handle uncertainty, and it’s
also an area overall that people don’t do a very good job of. I feel
that with all these modern computers people have this view that nearly
everything is known and it’s nearly all on the computer. Whereas I
find that if I go almost anywhere, I can ask questions like “do you
know how accurate your measurements are?” and they don’t.
Geoff says he quite enjoys being the one to throw a spanner into the
works.
As a statistician at CMIS in Clayton, his job presently includes work
for the mining industry, looking at mineral sampling, and the
variabilities in the blending of stockpiles.
Geoff heads a 'variation' group in the newly refocussed CMIS.
At a recent Iron Ore International Standards meeting in Kiruna,
Sweden - Geoff recalls the wonderful way they had delegates meet and
interact, where delegates had to sing for their supper after the
conference dinner.
“Each national delegation sings a song or two. We Australians go
first for alphabetical reasons and are usually the loudest. The
Brazilians show musical talent. The Chinese and the Japanese sing at
least one song together, which is a substantial show of friendship first
achieved at the Beijing meeting. Much of the goodwill required for
progress in developing new Standards seems to be generated by joining in
the singing of other delegations' songs.”
Geoff’s work over the years has been varied, but he says one
consistent theme has been the “testing and sampling of stuff.”
“I’ve been involved in standards committees and consulting work
on the testing of iron ore, I’ve done work on gold ore, appearing in a
court case, I’ve looked at the sampling and testing of milk.”
Previous jobs have seen him working in bitumen and in road
construction, while he is currently looking into sampling grain to test
for potential genetically modified contamination, as well as starting a
project with the NSW Government on the sampling of woodchips.
During his tenure with the dairy industry, Geoff was approached by a
colleague who was an international standard badminton umpire who asked
him to design a standard for international ranking of badminton players,
which he ended up basing on the same sort of technology he had
previously employed for ranking dairy bulls.
“We had some very funny conversations with this fellow,” Geoff
recalls, “where we talked about which badminton players were likely to
be more analogous to the natural service bull and which were likely to
be analogous to the bulls in artificial insemination.
“I was sure the badminton players wouldn’t have enjoyed hearing
that conversation, but it was intriguing that, and I guess this was a
feature in my career, very often something that has been done in one
area I’ve then been able to use in something entirely different.”
Born in Melbourne, Geoff grew up in rural Victoria, attending what he
claims was the worst high school in the state.
Now father to four daughters (respectively 20, 17 and 13 year old
twins), Geoff enjoys unpredictability and unknown variables in both his
home and his working life. |
