Andrew D. Booth – Britain’s Other “Fourth Man” - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 35

The 1956/57 College Report reported that language processing work continued
apace:
Work on machine translation of languages has, however, continued at full
speed and with the completion of the French programme for scientific texts
attention has been transferred to German and to aspects of Platonic
chronology. The laboratory was fortunate in having Dr Rais Ahmed, from the
University of Aligarh, as a guest during part of his sabbatical leave and his
presence gave considerable impact to the work on spoken word recognition.
[13]
One of Birkbeck College's best known former students and now a College Fellow,
Dame Steve Shirley who later founded a major UK software house that became
Xansa, remembers as a student of mathematics and computing at that time:
intoning “one, one, one .... two, two, two ....” into a tape recorder for some
very early voice recognition research led by Andrew Booth [14]
Their wider contribution to this community has been assessed in the topic by John
Hutchins in his book Early Years in Machine Translation [15].
7 Other Achievements
Andrew Booth was an innovator in many areas of his life. The College Annual Report
for the 1956/57 records the Governors' resolution on July 18 th 1957 that:
From the beginning of the next session [October 1957] the Computer Laboratory
be constituted as a separate Department under the Headship of Dr A D Booth [13]
The author has been told that the Department of Numerical Automation was the
first academic department established to teach computing in a UK university and pos-
sibly worldwide, elsewhere the courses were still taught in computer laboratories.
Also the department's M.Sc in Numerical Automation started in October 1957 was
the first degree programme, many others, including at Birkbeck, having been Post-
graduate Diplomas. These are difficult claims to verify and the author would welcome
any information of earlier activity.
Outside the Department, Andrew Booth's played a key role through his appoint-
ment as chairman of a committee formed to set up a “National Computer Society”.
The 1956/57 Report notes that when it was formed in June 1957 he was elected to
serve on the first Council of the British Computer Society, [13].
One notable landmark was Kathleen Booth's book on programming the APEC
computers [16]. This was an early book on programming and unusual in having a
female author. She did most of the programming while Andrew Booth built the
computers.
The College Report of 1958/59, in a foretaste of much more recent work, reports
Dr Kathleen Booth developing a program to simulate a neural network to investigate
ways in which animals recognise patterns. The following year reports a neural net-
work for character recognition.
The College Report for 1961/62 recorded that Andrew and Kathleen Booth re-
signed at the end of the 1961/62 academic year. Andrew Booth has given his account