Tsotsos (York University, Toronto)
Specialization: Computer science, computational perception, psychophysics
Accolades: Tier I NSERC Canada Research Chair in Computational Vision, CITO Innovation Award for Leardership in Product Development, CP-UNITEL Fellow, Canadian Institute for Ad

John K. Tsotsos received an honours undergraduate degree in Engineering Science in 1974 from the University of Toronto and continued at the University of Toronto to complete a Master's degree in 1976 and a Ph.D. in 1980 both in Computer Science. He was then appointed to a 2-year Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine and as an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. In 1980, he founded the computer vision research group in the department. Following his postdoctoral term, he spent several months at the University of Hamburg to work with Prof. H.-H. Nagel on visual motion understanding. On his return to Canada, he was awarded a 3-year Canadian Heart Foundation Research Scholarship. This award, intended to annually recognize the best cardiology research in Canada, was for his work on knowledge-based interpretation of left ventricular cineangiograms which resulted in a computer system named ALVEN . This system was able to quantify the performance of the human left ventricle post-operatively and to classify the dynamics as normal or as one a number of abnormalities. In 1985, he was appointed a Fellow in the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. On July 1, 1990, Tsotsos was promoted to the rank of Professor. In November of 1990, he was named the Canadian Pacific (Unitel) Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. His two 5-year terms as CIAR Fellow recognize the importance of his work on the computational complexity of biological visual perception, the development of an accompanying theory of visual attention that makes strong predictions (and now with extensive supporting experimental evidence) about the psychophysics and neurobiology of human and primate perception, and the practical application of this work in the development of PLAYBOT, a visually-guided robot to assist physically disabled children in play.

He moved to York University in January 2000 where he currently holds a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Computational Vision, is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at York University in Toronto and is the Director of York University's Center for Vision Research. Tsotsos is also an Adjunct Professor in Computer Science and in Ophthalmology both at the University of Toronto.

Tsotsos has published many scientific papers, five conference papers receiving recognition. He was awarded the 1997 CITO Innovation Award for Leadership in Product Development, shared with W. James MacLean, for image target detection software based on his theory of visual attention. He has served on numerous conference committees and on the editorial boards of Image & Vision Computing Journal, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence and Medicine. He served as the General Chair for the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision 1999. New editorial activities include a Special Issue on Attention and Performance for Computer Vision and Image Understanding (with L. Paletta, R. Fisher and G. Humphreys), and Neurobiology of Attention for Elsevier Press (with L. Itti and G. Rees) both appearing during 2005.