John F. Canny is an Australian computer scientist

Computer scientist

A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....

, and Paul and Stacy Jacobs Distinguished Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

. He has made significant contributions in various areas of computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 and mathematics

Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...

 including artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

, robotics

Robotics

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

, computer graphics

Computer graphics

Computer graphics are graphics created using computers and, more generally, the representation and manipulation of image data by a computer with help from specialized software and hardware....

, human-computer interaction, computer security

Computer security

Computer security is a branch of computer technology known as information security as applied to computers and networks. The objective of computer security includes protection of information and property from theft, corruption, or natural disaster, while allowing the information and property to...

, computational algebra, and computational geometry

Computational geometry

Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems are also considered to be part of computational...

.

Biography

John Canny received his B.Sc. in Computer Science and Theoretical Physics from the University of Adelaide

University of Adelaide

The University of Adelaide is a public university located in Adelaide, South Australia. Established in 1874, it is the third oldest university in Australia...

 in South Australia, 1979, a B.E. (Hons) in Electrical Engineering, University of Adelaide, 1980, a M.S. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

, 1983 and 1987, respectively.

In 1987 he joined the faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.

In 1987 he received the Machtey Award

Machtey Award

The Machtey Awardis awarded at the annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science to that author of the best student paper. A paper qualifies as a student paper if all authors are full-time students at the date of the submission...

 and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. In 1999 he was the co-chair of the Annual Symposium on Computational Geometry. In 2002 the American Association for Artificial Intelligence

American Association for Artificial Intelligence

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence or AAAI is an international, nonprofit, scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines...

 Classic Paper Award for the most influential paper from the 1983 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. As the author of "A Variational Approach to Edge Detection" and the creator of the widely used Canny edge detector, he was honored for seminal contributions in the areas of robotics and machine perception.

Publications

Canny has published several books, papers and articles. A selection:

• 1986. A computational approach to edge detection. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 8, 1986, pp. 679-698.
• 1988. The Complexity of Robot Motion Planning. The ACM Distinguished Dissertation Series, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988.
• 1993. "An opportunistic global path planner". With M. C. Lin. In: Algorithmica vol. 10, no. 2-4, pp. 102-120, Aug. 1993.
• 2007. "MultiView: Improving trust in group video conferencing through spatial faithfulness" (Best Paper Prize). With D. T. Nguyen In: Proc. 2007 SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '07), New York, NY: The Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2007, pp. 1465-1474.

External links

• John F. Canny Homepage at UC Berkeley