Roberto Cipolla obtained a B.A. (Engineering) from the University of Cambridge in 1984 and an M.S.E. (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. From 1985 to 1988 he studied and worked in Japan at the Osaka University of Foreign Studies (Japanese Language) and Electrotechnical Laboratory.

In 1991 he was awarded a D.Phil. (Computer Vision) from the University of Oxford and from 1991-92 was a Toshiba Fellow and engineer at the Toshiba Corporation Research and Development Centre in Kawasaki, Japan. He joined the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge in 1992 as a Lecturer and a Fellow of Jesus College. He became a Reader in Information Engineering in 1997 and a Professor in 2000.

His research interests are in computer vision and robotics and include the recovery of motion and 3D shape of visible surfaces from image sequences; object detection and recognition; novel man-machine interfaces using hand, face and body gestures; real-time visual tracking for localisation and robot guidance; aplications of computer vision in mobile phones, visual inspection and image-retrieval and video search. He has authored 3 books, edited 8 volumes and co-authored more than 300 papers.