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Harry Grove Barrow (born 7 May 1943) is a retired British researcher in the field of artificial intelligence and computer vision.

Early life
He was born in Gourock, Scotland and spent his childhood in Harlow and Waltham Abbey. He was educated at Cheshunt Grammar School, before being awarded an exhibition to read for a B.A. in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. Following his graduation in 1965, he obtained his M.Sc. (1967) and a Ph.D. (1969) in Donald MacKay's Department of Communication at Keele University. His first involvement with computers was writing a system to run psychophysical experiments, presenting patterns via the stimulator to a subject and recording the responses and response times, and analyzing the results. He then worked on reverse engineering the Fortran compiler and run-time system and then extending the functionality. He also wrote a mag tape-based bibliography management system while at Keele.

Freddy projects
He then moved to work at Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception (DMIP) at Edinburgh University, where he was a major contributor to the Freddy projects under the supervision of Donald Michie. He initially worked on Freddy I, a vidicon TV camera on wheels, for which his first task was to design and build an interface to the computer that could make Freddy move forward or reverse. He worked on robotics and robot control languages, including the POP-2 programming language that was one of the world's first functional programming languages, in the AI department of the university.

Following this, he began working on Freddy II. The early thoughts and concepts on Freddy II were written in the “Mark 1.5 Edinburgh robot facility”. One of the improvements with Freddy II lay in object recognition techniques which could recognise, including ‘cups’, and the manipulation of separated parts of wooden toys to assemble the toy in the right order and orientation. Barrow worked on the hardware design, the control and sensing software. He wrote a real-time operating system for the Honeywell 316, the display software (the work was performed prior to the development of GPUs), and the image processing software.

Freddy II is currently in the National Museum of Scotland. A video of the machine in action is narrated by Barrow.

Later work
Following his work in Edinburgh, he moved to Artificial Intelligence Center at Stanford Research Institute in California where he worked as a Senior Computer Scientist (1975-1980). He was one of the four founders of Fairchild Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence Research (FLAIR) in Palo Alto, California in 1980, which evolved into Schlumberger Palo Alto Research (SPAR). In 1988 Barrow returned to the UK to take up the position of Professor of Artificial Intelligence at School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex (1988-1996), before becoming Scientific Advisor at Schlumberger Cambridge Research. He retired in 2007 after nearly 50 years of in research in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.

He was also a member of the editorial board of Artificial Intelligence and Future Generation Computer Systems.