John Canny
Also known as John F. Canny
John Canny is a computer science professor at UC Berkeley, known for the Canny edge detector that he developed in 1986 to find edges in images. He joined Berkeley's faculty in 1987 and was named a Packard Fellow in 1988. In 2002 the American Association for Artificial Intelligence gave him its Classic Paper Award. Since 2002 he has developed behavioral modeling systems at scale, and in 2015 he co-wrote a paper applying roofline design to machine learning. As of October 2026 he holds the Paul and Stacy Jacobs Distinguished Professor of Engineering title at Berkeley.
- Works
- 350
- Citations
- 52,042
- h-index
- 72
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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1980–1987
Degrees in Adelaide and at MIT
An honors degree in electrical engineering from the University of Adelaide comes in 1980, followed by MIT master's and doctoral degrees in 1983 and 1987.
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1986
Finding edges in images
In 1986 he develops the Canny edge detector, a multi-stage algorithm that detects a wide range of edges in images.
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1987
A faculty post at Berkeley
In 1987 he joins the faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.
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1988
A Packard Fellowship
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation lists him as a Packard Fellow for 1988, and he is also an ACM dissertation award winner.
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2002
A classic paper from 1983
He receives the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Classic Paper Award in 2002, for the most influential paper from the 1983 National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
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Since 2002
Behavioral models at scale
Large-scale behavioral modeling systems are the work he has been developing and deploying.
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2015
Rooflines for machine learning
A 2015 paper he co-wrote, 'Machine Learning at the Limit', applies roofline design to large-scale machine learning.
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As of October 2026
A named chair at Berkeley
His title is Paul and Stacy Jacobs Distinguished Professor of Engineering in Berkeley's computer science department.
Sources and credits
Photo: Derrick Coetzee ( User:Dcoetzee ), via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
