Ralph Martin obtained his PhD in 1983 from Cambridge University. He is now an Emeritus Professor of Cardiff University, where he led the Visual Computing research group. He was also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua Universiy in China, and was Director of Scientific Programmes of the One Wales Research Institute of Visual Computing. His publications include about 300 papers and 15 books covering such topics as solid and surface modelling, reverse engineering, computer vision, image processing, and geometric reasoning. He was a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, and the British Computer Society. He is associate editor-in-chief of "Computational Visual Media", He was awarded a "Friendship Award" by the Chinese Government, its highest award for foreigners.