Professor Robertson researches new underpinning machine learning methods for visual analytics and his principal research focus is computer vision. He started his career in the UK Scientific Civil Service with DERA (2000-2002) and QinetiQ (2002-2007) and was the 1851 Royal Commission Fellow at Oxford University (2003–2006) before taking up a full-time academic post in Edinburgh until 2016 when he moved to Queen's.

His artificial intelligence research is extensive. Academic highlights include 5-year EPSRC Programmes UDRC Phase 2 (2012-2017) and Phase 3 (2018-2023), and the EPSRC RAS CDT (2013-2018). He is regular contributor to the major computer vision and machine learning conferences including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV and AAAI. 

Neil is passionate about technology innovation and is variously the Founder/Co-founder/Director of high tech start-up companies which have attracted significant institutional investment.