David Forsyth (computer scientist)

David A. Forsyth is an American computer scientist and full professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, born in Cape Town, South Africa.

Forsyth holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford for research supervisor J. Michael Brady in 1988.

He was a full professor at the University of California, Berkeley before moving to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He co-authored, with UIUC CS Professor Jean Ponce, 2002's "Computer Vision: A Modern Approach", one of the leading publications addressing the topic. He has published over 100 papers on computer vision, computer graphics and machine learning. He served as program co-chair for IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 2000, general co-chair for IEEE CVPR 2006, program co-chair for ECCV 2008, program co-chair for IEEE CVPR 2011, general co-chair for IEEE CVPR 2015, and is a regular member of the program committee of all major international conferences on computer vision. He served on the NRC Committee on "Protecting Kids from Pornography and other Inappropriate Material on the Internet", which sat for three years and produced a study widely praised for its sensible content. He has received best paper awards at the International Conference on Computer Vision and at the European Conference on Computer Vision.

David Forsyth's research interest also includes graphics and machine learning; he served as a committee member of ICML 2008.

In 2013, he was elected a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

He is married to Margaret Fleck, who is also a professor at the University of Illinois, and has three children.