John Tsotsos is Distinguished Research Professor of Vision Science and Director of the Centre for Innovation in Computing at Lassonde at York University in Toronto, with an Adjunct Professorship in Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences at the University of Toronto.
He received his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1980 developing the first AI computer system to interpret visual motion depicted in digital image sequences, with application to heart motion analysis. After a postdoctoral fellowship in Cardiology at Toronto General Hospital, he joined the University of Toronto on faculty in Computer Science and in Medicine.
In 1980 he founded the highly respected Computer Vision Group at the University of Toronto, which he led for 20 years. He was recruited to move to York University in 2000 as Director of the Centre for Vision Research. Under his directorship, the centre was ranked in the top six interdisciplinary vision research organizations in the world. He has been a Canadian Heart Foundation Research Scholar (1981-83), a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (1985-90), CP-Unitel Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (1990-95) and currently holds the NSERC Tier I Canada Research Chair in Computational Vision (2003-2024).
He has received many awards and honours including 10 conference best paper distinctions, among them a 1987 inaugural Marr Prize citation at the 1st International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV). He received a 1997 CITO Innovation Award for Leadership in Product Development, the 2006 Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society Award for Research Excellence and Service, was named Distinguished Research Professor of Vision Science at York University in 2008, the 1st President’s Research Excellence Award by York University on the occasion of the University’s 50th anniversary in 2009, and the 2011 Geoffrey J. Burton Memorial Lectureship jointly from the United Kingdom’s Applied Vision Association and the British Machine Vision Association for significant contribution to vision science. He has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker, is an IEEE Life Fellow, an Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association Fellow and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2010, in the Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences of the Academy of Science, and was awarded its 2015 Sir John William Dawson Medal for sustained excellence in multidisciplinary research, the first computer scientist to be so honoured. He was awarded a 2020 CS-Can|Info-Can Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science, the first computer vision researcher to receive this honour. Visiting positions were held at: University of Hamburg, Germany; Polytechnical University of Crete, Greece; Center for Advanced Studies at IBM Canada; INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France; and, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA.
In his academic career, he has mentored close to 200 trainees, many going on to faculty positions around the world and to major industries with over a dozen starting their own companies.