Trevor Taylor | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Education | PhD |
| Occupation | Retired |
| Employer | Various |
| Known for | Robotics |
Trevor Taylor was born in Australia at the tail end of the "baby boom" and spent most of his life in Brisbane where he studied Chemical Engineering at the University of Queensland.
After graduating in 1976, he went to the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) where he earned Masters degrees in Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. When he returned to Australia, he never practised as a chemical or electrical engineer. Instead his first job was with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as a software specialist in 1981 in Sydney.
After leaving DEC, he worked for The Digital Centre, a retailer selling the (then) new range of DEC PCs and microVAX computers. After a few years, he moved back to Brisbane to work for Dialog Consulting and then Praxa. During this period he became well known in the DECUS (Digital Equipment Computer Users Society) community as a VAX/VMS and DECwindows expert. Trevor established a record of 10 successive papers at the annual DECUS Symposium, including winning the Best Paper Prize twice (after which he was excluded from the competition).
In 1995, Trevor left Praxa to start a consulting company with Allan Klason. This company, Nets & Webs, eventually grew to 20 people before it was sold to ComTech Communications in January 2000, narrowly missing the Dot-Com bust. Trevor worked for ComTech for a couple of years during which time it changed name to Dimension Data. In 2001, Dimension Data laid off a large number of staff Australia-wide due to the downturn in the IT industry. Being a middle manager, Trevor found himself without a job for the first time in his career.
Having always had a flair for teaching, Trevor took a job at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) as a Lecturer in 2002. He also began work immediately on a PhD part-time. In 2005, he won the Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence. He was also a Teaching Fellow.
His PhD research was in the areas of computer vision and robotics. While he was at QUT, Microsoft released a product called Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio and he quickly became an expert in this new software environment, eventually co-authoring a book "Professional Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio" with Kyle Johns. This became the definitive textbook on the subject.
In 2008, Trevor was offered a job at Microsoft as a Program Manager in the Robotics Group. He and his wife moved to Redmond, WA, leaving the adult children in Brisbane. He continued to work on his PhD in his spare time and finally graduated in 2009. He was promoted to Senior Member of the IEEE and a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft in 2010.
The Robotics Group was shut down in 2012 and Trevor moved to Windows Phone, which was also shut down in 2014. He then spent a couple of years working in Windows Graphics before retiring in 2016 and returning to Australia.