Eric Grimson

William Eric Leifur Grimson (born 1953) is a Canadian-born computer scientist and former Chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to his appointment as Chancellor in March 2011, Grimson was head of the university's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Bernard Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering. He is a native of Estevan, Saskatchewan.

Life and career

Grimson was born in 1953 in Estevan, Saskatchewan where his father, William, was the principal of Estevan Collegiate Institute, the local high school, and his mother an eminent musician and teacher of piano performance and music theory. The family later moved to Regina where he attended Campbell Collegiate and the University of Regina, graduating in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and physics. In 1980, he received his PhD in mathematics from MIT. His doctoral dissertation, Computing shape using a theory of human stereo vision, was on computer vision, a field which would become the focus of his research career. An expanded version of the dissertation was published by MIT Press in 1981 as From Images To Surfaces: A Computational Study of the Human Early Vision System, which was endorsed by Tomaso Poggio and Noam Chomsky.

After completing his PhD, Grimson worked as a research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and joined the university's faculty in 1984. He eventually rose to Bernard Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering and Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In February 2011, he was appointed Chancellor of MIT, succeeding Phillip Clay, and took up his post the following month. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2000), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2004) and Association for Computing Machinery (2014).

Awards

• 2014. ACM Fellow.

For contributions to computer vision, and medical image computing.

• 2004. IEEE Fellow.

For contributions to surface reconstruction, object-recognition, image database indexing and medical applications.

• 2000. AAAI Fellow.

For significant contributions to the theory and application of computer vision, ranging from algorithms for binocular stereo, surface interpolation and object recognition to deployed systems for computer-assisted surgery.

• ACM Fellows 2014
• AAAI FELLOWS

Selected works

• 2003. Object Recognition by Computer: The Role of Geometric Constraints. MIT press
• 1989. AI in the 1980s and Beyond: An MIT Survey. (Ed. with Ramesh S. Patil) MIT press
• 1981. From Images to Surfaces: A Computational Study of the Human Early Visual System. MIT press

Endorsed by Tomaso Poggio and Noam Chomsky;

Dedicated to David Marr.

Personal life

Grimson is married to Wellesley College professor, Ellen Hildreth. The couple have two sons