I moved to York University in Toronto in January 2000 to become the Director of York's Centre for Vision Research - a spectacular collection of scientists and labs from many disciplines within vision science - with a primary appointment in the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering. I served as Director until November 2006, where among other accomplishments, I defined the administrative, financial, and research infrastructure of the centre, expanded its membership, and shepherded the centre through a major external evaluation where it was ranked within the top six inter-disciplinary vision research centres in the world. I currently hold the NSERC Tier I Canada Research Chair in Computational Vision and am also an Adjunct Professor in both the departments of Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences and of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. In June 2008, I was named Distinguished Research Professor of Vision Science at York University.

I have published many papers, six conference papers receiving recognition (highlighted in red on the Publications page). Among other awards, I received the 1997 CITO Innovation Award for Leadership in Product Development, shared with W. James MacLean, for image target detection software based on my theory of visual attention, the 2006 Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society Award for Research Excellence and Service, and am an ACM Distinguished Speaker. In November 2009, I was awarded the 1st President’s Research Excellence Award by York University on the occasion of the University’s 50th anniversary.

I have served on numerous conference committees and on the editorial boards of Image & Vision Computing Journal, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence and Medicine. I was the General Chair for the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision 1999. Laurent Itti, Geraint Rees and I edited the encyclopedic volume Neurobiology of Attention for Elsevier Press, 2005. I am in the final stages of completing my first monograph titled A Computational Perspective on Visual Attention, to be published by The MIT Press.

My research currently has three main themes: visual attention in humans and computer systems; visually-guided mobile robotics; and computer vision.