Theo Pavlidis

Timeline

1. 1934–1964

   Degrees from Athens and Berkeley

   Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 1934, he earns an engineering diploma in Athens in 1957. He completes an electrical engineering PhD at Berkeley in 1964.

2. 1964–1980

   Teaching at Princeton

   He joins Princeton as an assistant professor in 1964 and becomes a full professor in 1975. In 1979 the IEEE names him a Fellow.

3. 1980–1986

   A research post at Bell Labs

   In 1980 he joins AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, as a member of technical staff. In 1982 he becomes senior editor of the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, a post he holds through 1986.

4. 1986–2001

   Stony Brook, then Symbol Technologies

   He resumes teaching in 1986 and becomes a distinguished professor at Stony Brook in 1995. He retires from Stony Brook in 2001 and joins Symbol Technologies as chief computer scientist, where he works briefly before leaving research.

5. 1990s

   Scanner algorithms for bar codes

   In the early 1990s, the National Science Foundation supports his research on computer vision and optical character recognition. He and his colleagues develop an algorithm that lets scanners read bar codes that are messy or hard to read.

6. 1994

   An IAPR fellowship

   In 1994 the IAPR names him a Fellow for contributions to computer graphics and image processing and for service to the IAPR.

7. 2000

   The King-Sun Fu Prize

   He receives the IAPR King-Sun Fu Prize in 2000 for algorithms that underpin many pattern recognition and image processing domains, including bar-code technology.

8. As of October 2026

   A retired computer scientist

   He is a retired computer scientist and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook.