Dr John (Roly) Lishman

26^th July 1946 - 25^th October 2021

John (Roly) Lishman was born in Tynemouth in 1946, to Maureen (nee Forsyth) and Roy. He attended Bootham School, where he developed a lifelong fascination with technology through the radio club. He studied physics at Queens' from 1964. In the summer of 1967, he and friends from Queens' drove a Land Rover to Kathmandu, via Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and India, during the long vacation. After Cambridge he moved to Edinburgh to do a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, working in the psychology department. Dad was from a Quaker background, and at a quaker meeting in Edinburgh, he met our mother, Joyce. They married in 1970, and had two children: Tamsin, born in 1976, and Benjamin, in 1980.

In 1977, after completing his PhD, Roly took up a lectureship in the Department of Psychology at Aberdeen University. He and Joyce lived in Aberdeen for the rest of their lives. Roly's interests in psychology had been around the meaning of intelligence, and how computers could mimic human behaviour. He moved to the nascent Department of Computing Science in 1984. He carried out research on face recognition; on analysis of children's gaits (with Carnegie Mellon University); and on analysis of land use using satellite imagery. He was extremely proud of an interdisciplinary collaboration around road safety, and in the late 1980’s, he appeared on Tomorrow's World, explaining new research about children's safety when crossing the road. He loved teaching and working with students.

Roly also loved seeing and understanding the world. His reading habits were broad, including particular enthusiasm for science fiction, economics, psychology, and history. Throughout his whole life he read The Economist, as his father had done, and The Guardian. He had travelled throughout Europe as a child with his mother, sister, and brother, including caravanning to northern Sweden, Prague, and Moscow. He and Joyce drove coast-to-coast in the USA in the 1970’s. They loved rail travel and went from Aberdeen to Vladivostok by rail in 2017.  Roly and Joyce were married for fifty years. Their partnership was built on love, mutual admiration, and a shared sense of purpose. He was a loving and devoted father and carried this through into being a loving and devoted grandfather. He described himself enthusiastically as a son of Tyneside. He found his true home in Aberdeen and made many deep and lasting friendships.

Roly died of prostate cancer on the 25th October 2021. We remember his enthusiasm for the world, his love of our mother, his love of technology and engineering, his devotion as a father, his excitement and delight as a grandfather, his strong moral compass, his belief in progress and enlightenment, and his contribution to that same progress and enlightenment.

Ben and Tamsin Lishman

13^th December 2021