Demetri Terzopoulos

Education

Terzopoulos was educated at McGill University where he was awarded an Honours Bachelor of Engineering degree in 1978 and a Master of Engineering degree in 1980, both in electrical engineering. He went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded a PhD in 1984 for research on the computation of visible-surface representations, advised by Shimon Ullman and Mike Brady.

Career and research

Following his PhD, Terzopoulos was a research scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), a program leader at Schlumberger research centres in California and Texas, Professor of Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering at the Dynamic Graphics Project of University of Toronto, and Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University where he held a Lucy and Henry Moses Endowed Professorship in Science. He then moved to UCLA, where he has been Chancellor's Professor of Computer Science since 2005 and Distinguished Professor since 2012.

Terzopoulos has also held adjunct, visiting, consultancy, and part-time positions at Schlumberger, IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, Bell-Northern Research, the National Research Council, the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, and Paris Dauphine University.

Terzopoulos' research interests are in computer graphics, computer vision, medical imaging, computer-aided design, artificial intelligence and artificial life.

Terzopoulos has served on advisory committees at DARPA (United States), the National Science Foundation (United States), the National Institutes of Health (United States), the National Academies, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada), and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (Germany).

Awards and honours

Terzopoulos was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, is an ACM Fellow, a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), and a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a member of the European Academy of Sciences, the New York Academy of Sciences, and Sigma Xi. Terzopoulos was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2014. His certificate of election and candidature reads:

In 2013, at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Terzopoulos was awarded a Helmholtz Prize for his 1987 ICCV paper with Kass and Witkin on active contour models.

In 2007, at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Terzopoulos was awarded the inaugural IEEE PAMI Computer Vision Distinguished Researcher Award for "pioneering and sustained research on deformable models and their applications".

In 2006, at the 78th Academy Awards, Terzopoulos won an Academy Award for Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with John Platt for "their pioneering work in physically-based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures."