Dr. John Tsotsos

Biography

Professor John K. Tsotsos is currently a Distinguished Research Professor in Vision Science at York University and holds the NSERC Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Computational Vision. He became the founding Director of the Centre for Innovation in Computing at Lassonde in 2014 and holds adjunct appointments in the Departments of Computer Science, Ophthalmology, and Vision Sciences at the University of Toronto. He directed the highly respected Centre for Vision Research at York University from 2000 to 2006. His research efforts span computer vision, computational neuroscience, human vision, artificial intelligence, and robotics. He is a recipient of the 2006 Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society Award for Research Excellence and the first President’s Research Excellence Award from York University in 2009. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Academy of Sciences, Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences in 2010, and named the Geoffrey J. Burton Memorial Lecturer by the United Kingdom's Applied Vision Association in 2011 for his significant contributions to vision science. In 2015, he became the first computer scientist awarded the Sir John William Dawson Medal from the Royal Society of Canada for sustained excellence in interdisciplinary research, and he was named an IEEE Fellow in 2018. Prior to joining York University in 2000, he was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he began his academic career in 1980 and founded the department's Computer Vision Group, which he led for 20 years. He was also appointed in the Division of Cardiology, Faculty of Medicine, and was a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research from 1985 to 1995. He has published over 300 papers, eight of which have received distinctions, and his recent research monograph, "A Computational Perspective on Visual Attention," was published by MIT Press in 2011.

Research Interests