Dr Tony Hooley
After receiving a BSc (First Class Honours) in Electronics from University of London, in 1971 Dr Hooley joined the Radio Astronomy Group (Department of Physics, University of Cambridge), with a PhD awarded in 1976.
In 1974 he joined the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy as one of a team of four who designed and built the APM Machine which from around 1980 operated as a National Facility for some 25 years. He founded his first company, Eicon Research Ltd, in 1978 while still at IOA, which developed, manufactured and sold internationally the DisCache – a 40MB hi-speed-networked hard-drive for almost every microcomputer (Apple’s biggest drive at the time was 140KB).
Dr Hooley moved to WAIT in Western Australia in 1986, teaching image-processing, and founded another company, CBTDL, which consulted on projects including a robot-window-cleaner; a stereo-photogrammetry system for mass-estimation of mine spoil-heaps; a CAD system for WA’s biggest metal-manufacture. In Sydney, 1990 he was Managing-Director of University of Technology, Sydney’s commercial arm, Insearch Ltd, while also consulting on data-base systems and computer networks. Moving back to Cambridge in 1993 as Tech-Director of AI-Cambridge he helped develop ultra-sensitive explosive detection systems.
In 1995 Dr Hooley founded 1… Ltd, where he designed and patented the Digital Sound Projector, which first Pioneer (Japan), and then Yamaha (Japan) licenced – Yamaha have since sold more than $2Bn of product as Yamaha Sound Projector. 1… Ltd then worked on cellphone-camera autofocus and OIS devices using novel SMA technology and under its newer name of Cambridge Mechatronics Ltd the technology was licenced to all the big Chinese cellphone/camera-manufacturers, and has been used in millions of products including the Huawei flagship smartphone ‘P40’. He founded Hooley Research Ltd in 1999 and continues as CEO, recently having completed two MoD contracts to design and prototype a novel passive phased-array-antenna for LEO satellites with exemplary noise performance and efficiency. Dr Hooley has more than 100 patents.
Select publications
- Radio Source structure, clusters of galaxies and the complex sources, T Hooley, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (01/1974); 166:259-270
- The Angular Diameter-redshift Test for Quasi-stellar Radio Sources with Large Redshifts, A. Hooley, MS. Longair and JM. Riley, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, vol. 182, (Jan. 1978), p. 127-145
- Number magnitude counts of faint galaxies, BA. Peterson, RS. Ellis, EJ. Kibblewhite, MT. Bridgeland, T. Hooley, & D. Horne, D, Astrophysical Journal, Part 2 – Letters to the Editor, 233, (Nov. 1, 1979), p. L109-L113. Bibliographic Code: 1979 ApJ…233 L.109P
- Discrimination of trace plastic explosives using neural networks, SG. Fox and T. Hooley, Proc. SPIE 2093, Substance Identification Analytics, 195 (February 1, 1994); doi:10.1117/12.172500
- Improvements in or relating to Loudspeakers, A. Hooley, Patent WO9631086 (A1) (03/10/1996) , 19960327
- Impedance matching and acoustic absorption in granular layers of silica aerogels, L. Forest, V. Gibiat, A. Hooley, J. of Non. Cryst. Sol., 285 (2001), 230-235
- Single box surround sound: Invited Review, T. Hooley, Acoust. Sci. & Tech. 27, 6 (2006)
- Method and apparatus to direct sound, A. Hooley [Gb]; T. Troughton[Gb]; A. Goudie [Gb]; A. Bienek[Gb]; P. Windle [Gb], 1… Ltd [Gb], Patent CN101165775 (A), (23/04/2008), 20000929
Select awards
- Winner, Systems Innovation of the Year, National Computing Centre’s Research, Innovation and Technology Award (RITA), 1985
- Winner, Design Product of the Year, The Manufacturing Industry Achievement Award, for its Digital Sound Projector product, 1999
- Winner, Business Man of The Year, Tenth Cambridge Evening News Business Excellence Awards, 2003
- Achievement Medal, The Institute of Electrical Engineers (now the IET), 2005
