Shimon Ullman

Who is Shimon Ullman?

Shimon Ullman is a professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Ullman's main research area is the study of vision processing by both humans and machines. Specifically, he focuses on object and facial recognition, and has made a number of key insights in this field, including with Christof Koch the idea of a visual saliency map in the mammalian visual system to regulate selective spatial attention.

He is the author of several books on the topic of vision, including High-level vision: Object recognition and visual cognition. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1977, and was David Marr’s first Ph.D. student.

Ullman is the former head of the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute, and the 2008 recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science. He is the co-founder of Orbotech and a member of Israel's Council for Higher Education.