Demetri Terzopoulos FRS FRSC is an Academy Award winning computer scientist, university professor, author, and entrepreneur.
He is Distinguished Professor and Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he directs the UCLA Computer Graphics & Vision Laboratory. He is also Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of VoxelCloud, Inc., a multinational healthcare AI company. He is or was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) of London and the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), a Distinguished Fellow of the International Engineering and Technology Institute (IETI), a Member of the European Academy of Sciences (EAS) and the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), and a Life Member of Sigma Xi.
Terzopoulos received the PhD degree ('84) in Artificial Intelligence from the EECS Department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the MEng and Honours BEng degrees in Electrical Engineering from McGill University. After graduation, he remained at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab as a research scientist. Prior to becoming an academic, he was employed at Schlumberger, Inc., serving as a Program Leader at corporate research centers in Palo Alto, California, and Austin, Texas. He joined the University of Toronto in 1989, where he was first an associate professor and then a full professor in the departments of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering. He joined UCLA in 2005 from New York University, where since 2000 he had held the Lucy and Henry Moses Endowed Professorship in Science and was Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. From 2018 to 2023 he was an Advisory Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he co-directs the SJTU-UCLA Center for Machine Perception and Inference. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris-Dauphine and Singapore's Institute for Infocomm Research, and a consultant at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, at Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, CA, at Digital's (subsequently Compaq's and Hewlett-Packard's) Cambridge Research Laboratory in Cambridge, MA, at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, NJ, and at the Schlumberger Laboratory for Computer Science in Austin, TX.
Professor Terzopoulos has been listed by ISI and other citation indexes among the most highly-cited authors in engineering and computer science. His published work comprises more than 400 scientific publications, primarily in computer graphics, computer vision, medical image analysis, computer-aided design, and artificial intelligence/life, including the volumes Real-Time Computer Vision (Cambridge Univ. Press '94), Animation and Simulation (Springer-Verlag '95), Deformable Models in Medical Image Analysis (IEEE CS Press '98), and Distributed Video Sensor Networks (Springer '11). His research has been funded by several companies and by the National Science Foundation, the National Academies, the Department of Defense (Army, DARPA, TSWG), the Intelligence Community (CIA, IARPA), the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and by the Guggenheim, Okawa, and Rothman Foundations, as well as in Canada by NSERC, CIFAR, CITO, PRECARN, ITRC, etc. He has given more than 500 invited talks worldwide on his research, including well over 100 distinguished lectures and keynote or plenary addresses.
Professor Terzopoulos is the recipient of a 2005 Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his pioneering work on physics-based computer graphics for motion pictures. From the IEEE, he received the Computer Pioneer Award in 2020 (video) and, in 2007, he was the inaugural recipient of the 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 [Systems engineering and theory → Modeling → Deformable models]. His other citations include an award from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) in 1987 for his work on deformable models in vision, a Helmholtz Prize in 2013 and an inaugural Marr Prize citation in 1987 from the IEEE for his work on active contours (snakes), an award from NICOGRAPH in 1996 for his work on human facial modeling and animation, two awards from Computers & Graphics in 2002 for his work on dynamic virtual humans and deformable models in medical image analysis, two citations from the International Medical Informatics Association in 1999 and 2003 for his work on model-based medical image analysis and an NVIDIA award from the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Society in 2018 for his work on deep-learning-based medical image analysis, a citation from SAE International in 2006 for his work on autonomous virtual pedestrians, awards from the International Digital Media Foundation in 1994 and from Ars Electronica (the premier competition for creative work with digital media) in 1995 for his work on artificial animals for computer animation and virtual reality, and six University of Toronto Arts and Science Excellence Awards. The Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society (CIPPRS) cited him for his "outstanding contributions to research and education in image understanding" with its Young Investigator Award (1998) as well as its lifetime achievement Award for Research Excellence (2015). The Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society (CHCCS) recognized him with its 2023 Achievement Award for his "pioneering and sustained contributions to computer graphics over the course of nearly four decades". The PhD thesis of his student Xiaoyuan Tu won the 1996 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award and in 2003 his PhD student Alex Vasilescu was named a TR100 Top Young Innovator by Technology Review magazine.
Terzopoulos has been a Killam Research Fellow of the Canada Council for the Arts, an E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellow of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, an AI and Robotics Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and a Visiting Fellow at UCLA's Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics (IPAM).
He has served on DARPA, NSF, NIH, National Academies, and NSERC advisory committees, and on the Presidential Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Plank Institute for Informatics in Saarbrucken, Germany. He has served on the program committees of the major conferences in his fields of expertise, and was an Area Chair of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Program Co-Chair of the 1998 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) and the 2004 Pacific Graphics Conference (PG), Program Advisor of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), Technical Papers Advisor of the 2014 ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Conference, and Conference Co-Chair of the 2005 SIGGRAPH/EG Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA). He served as a Series Editor of the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (2004–2019) and is or was a founding member of the editorial and/or advisory boards of the journals Medical Image Analysis, SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, Graphical Models, Videre: Journal of Computer Vision Research, Applied Mathematics Research Express, Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization, and the Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds. He has been a consultant to about a dozen American, Canadian, and Japanese corporations.
Profile of Demetri Terzopoulos on Science.ca
Distinguished, Keynote and Plenary Talks
Academic Genealogy.
Another rendition.
A genealogy graph.
Demetri Terzopoulos