Shimon Ullman
Shimon Ullman researches human vision, computer vision and the acquisition of visual concepts. He received his MIT PhD in 1977. His models combine image information with higher-level knowledge gained through experience. With Nimrod Dorfman and Daniel Harari, he coauthored Discovering containment: from infants to machines, submitted as a preprint in 2016 and published in Cognition in 2019. The paper studies questions about learning meaningful concepts without guidance. He received the 2019 Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Achievement Award.
- Works
- 283
- Citations
- 24,650
- h-index
- 57
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
1977
Doctoral work at MIT
Ullman received his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 1977. His research lies at the intersection of visual perception and computation. This connects the study of human vision with methods for machine vision.
-
2016–2019
Learning the concept of containment
With Nimrod Dorfman and Daniel Harari, Ullman coauthored Discovering containment: from infants to machines. The preprint appeared in 2016; the paper was published in Cognition in 2019. It asks how meaningful visual concepts can be learned without explicit guidance.
-
2019
Computer vision recognition
Ullman received the 2019 Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Achievement Award.
-
As of October 2026
Visual features and knowledge
His model combines visual information from a scene with knowledge gained through experience. It uses both local feature processing and higher-level guidance. The model describes human perception and may have implications for future AI systems.
Sources and credits
Photo: EMET Prize (פרס א.מ.ת); Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 3.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
