Eric Grimson

William Eric Leifur Grimson is a Canadianborn computer scientist and former Chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to his appointment as Chancellor in March 2011, Grimson was head of the universitys Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Bernard Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering. He is a native of Estevan, Saskatchewan.

Grimson was born in 1953 in Estevan, Saskatchewan where his father, William, was the principal of Estevan Collegiate Institute, the local high school, and his mother an eminent musician and teacher of piano performance and music theory. The family later moved to Regina where he attended Campbell Collegiate and the University of Regina, graduating in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and physics. In 1980, he received his PhD in mathematics from MIT. His doctoral dissertation, Computing shape using a theory of human stereo vision, was on computer vision, a field which would become the focus of his research career. An expanded version of the dissertation was published by MIT Press in 1981 as From Images To Surfaces A Computational Study of the Human Early Vision System, which was endorsed by Tomaso Poggio and Noam Chomsky.

Source: Wikipedia