LOS ALAMITOS, Calif., 04 February 2020 – Dr. Demetri Terzopoulos, a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, has been selected to receive the IEEE Computer Society 2020 Women of the ENIAC Computer Pioneer Award, formerly named the IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award.
The award is given for significant contributions to early concepts and developments in the electronic computer field, which have clearly advanced the state-of-the-art in computing. Terzopoulos is being recognized “for a leading role in developing computer vision, computer graphics, and medical imaging through pioneering research that has helped unify these fields and has impacted related disciplines within and beyond computer science.”
Terzopoulos is a Chancellor’s Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the rank of Distinguished Professor and directs the UCLA Computer Graphics & Vision Laboratory. He is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of VoxelCloud, Inc., a multinational company that applies artificial intelligence to healthcare.
Terzopoulos is or was a Guggenheim Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society of London, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a member of the European Academy of Sciences and the New York Academy of Sciences, and a life member of Sigma Xi. His many awards include an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his pioneering work on physics-based computer animation, and IEEE’s inaugural Computer Vision Distinguished Researcher Award for his pioneering and sustained research on deformable models and their applications. “Deformable models”, a term he coined, appears in the IEEE Taxonomy.
He has received a Helmholtz Prize from the IEEE Computer Society, a Marr Prize citation, and over a dozen other best paper awards. The ISI and other indexes have listed him among the most highly-cited authors in engineering and computer science, with more than 400 published research papers and several volumes, primarily in computer graphics, computer vision, medical imaging, computer-aided design, and artificial intelligence/life. He has given more than 500 invited talks around the world about his research, including well over 100 distinguished lectures and keynote/plenary addresses.
Terzopoulos joined UCLA in 2005 from New York University, where he held the Henry and Lucy Moses Professorship in Science and was Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Previously, he was Professor of Computer Science and Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. Prior to becoming an academic in 1989, he was a Program Leader at Schlumberger corporate research centers in California and Texas.
He graduated from McGill University, received his PhD degree (’84) in Artificial Intelligence from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and remained a Research Scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory through 1985.
Recent recipients of the award include Laura Haas, Jitendra Malik, Barbara Liskov, Bjarne Stroustrup, Michael Flynn, Peter Kogge, Linus Torvalds, Edward Feigenbaum, and Cleve Moler.
The award consists of a silver medal and will be presented at the Computer Society’s annual awards dinner and presentation to be held on 27 May 2020 at the Hilton McLean Tysons Corner during the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors meeting.
Further information about the award, including a complete list of past recipients, may be found at www.computer.org/web/awards/pioneer.
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