Sven Dickinson

Sven Dickinson received the B.A.Sc. degree in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, in 1983, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, in 1988 and 1991, respectively. He is a Professor and past Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he’s been a faculty member since 2000.  From 2018-2024, he took a leave from the university to serve as Vice President and inaugural Head of the Samsung AI Research Center in Toronto, where he built up a team of over 40 individuals conducting research in AI.  Prior to coming to the University of Toronto, he was a faculty member at Rutgers University where he held a joint appointment between the Department of Computer Science and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS). Prior to his academic career, he worked in the computer vision industry, designing image processing systems for Grinnell Systems Inc., San Jose, CA, 1983-1984, and optical character recognition systems for DEST, Inc., Milpitas, CA, 1984-1985.

Dickinson’s research interests revolve around the problem of shape perception in both computer vision and human vision. He has received the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Government of Ontario Premiere’s Research Excellence Award, and the Lifetime Research Achievement Award from the Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, from 2017-2021, currently serves on seven editorial boards, and is co-editor of the Morgan & Claypool Synthesis Lectures on Computer Vision.  He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).  He has a distinguished record of service to the IEEE, as reflected in his being appointed an IEEE Golden Core Member.