Blair Hall

• Measurement models
• Measurement uncertainty
• Software for metrology
• Quality infrastructure

• Dr. ès Sci. (EPFL)

Blair leads MSL's Digital Metrology programme. 

Blair trained as a physicist. He holds a doctorate from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, for research into the atomic structure of nanometre-sized particles, and later worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Swiss national metrology institute (METAS) studying the quantum Hall effect. He returned to New Zealand in 1993 to lecture in Physics and Electronics at Massey University, then, in 1998, he joined MSL to develop national measurement standards for radio and microwave frequency quantities.

Blair is currently interested in the metrological challenges posed by emerging autonomous digital technologies that can generate and consume large amounts of measurement data unsupervised. He has pioneered the use of algorithmic uncertainty propagation in support of metrological traceability and was first to apply that method to microwave measurements. He has also developed a Python package, called the GUM Tree Calculator (GTC), which demonstrates advanced techniques for traceability support in digital systems. 

• B. D. Hall,“Software support for physical quantities”, Proceedings of the 9th Electronics New Zealand Conference, (2002).
• B. D. Hall, “Computing with Uncertain Numbers”, Metrologia, 43 (2006) L56–L61
• B. D. Hall, “Evaluating methods of calculating measurement uncertainty”, Metrologia, 45 (2008) L5-L8
• B. D. Hall, “Evaluating the measurement uncertainty of complex quantities: a selective review”, Metrologia 53 S25 (2015) (Focus issue on the 2015 BIPM GUM Revision workshop).
• B. D. Hall and D. R. White,“An introduction to measurement uncertainty”, (Measurement Standards Laboratory of New Zealand, 2018), ISBN: 978-0-473-40581-6.
• B. D. Hall, “An opportunity to enhance the value of metrological traceability in digital systems”, Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Metrology for Industry 4.0 and IoT (MetroInd4.0&IoT) (2019)
• B. D. Hall, "Software for calculation with physical quantities", Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Metrology for Industry 4.0 and IoT (MetroInd4.0&IoT) (2020).

• Member of the New Zealand Data and Digital Standards Community of Practice  
• Member of the CIPM Expert Group advising the CIPM Task Group on the Digital SI  
• Member of working group 1 of the APMP Technical Committee for Quality Systems (TCQS)
• Member of the International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO) technical committees: TC6-Digitalisation and TC21-Mathematical Tools for Measurements
• Chair of the APMP focus group on digital transformation in metrology