Professor Richard Leach

Measurement Uncertainty: The Essential Minimum
Professor Richard Leach, Manufacturing Metrology Team, Faculty of Engineering, University of Nottingham, UK

In this tutorial, you we learn all that is necessary to be able to assign a quantitative uncertainty with a measurement result. We will cover the following aspects: measurement traceability and terminology, error types, the SI infrastructure, single value uncertainty estimation, measurement with multiple variables, propagation of uncertainty and confidence intervals. Examples will be given from the fields of surface texture measurement and coordinate metrology. The course assumes no prior knowledge of uncertainty estimation and only a basic grasp of mathematics (some basic statistics and partial differentiation of simple functions).

Biography: Professor Richard Leach currently holds the Chair in Metrology in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham where he has established The Manufacturing Metrology Team to investigate information-rich metrology of surfaces, to support next-generation manufacturing technologies. Drawing on concepts such as machine learning and sensor fusion, his research is changing the approach to quality control in manufacturing. Prior to his current position, he spent 25 years at the National Physical Laboratory and led a team in surface and nanometrology. He is an internationally recognised researcher in the field of surface topography measurement, particularly in the area of traceability for areal surface metrology, including optical instruments. He has over 480 publications, including 6 textbooks. He is the European Editor-in-Chief for Precision Engineering journal. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics, the Institution of Engineering & Technology, the Institute of Measurement & Control, the International Society of Nanomanufacturing, the Higher Education Academy, a Sustained Member of the American Society of Precision Engineering and a Council Member of the European Society of Precision Engineering & Nanotechnology. Richard is a visiting professor at Loughborough University and the Harbin Institute of Technology.