Keynotes

Date: December 16, 2026

Date: December 18, 2026

Date: December 17, 2026

Abstract

I’ll present two recent projects from my lab:

(a) Is there a science of vision?
When I began studying vision, I thought the researchers would first learn the science of vision, and then build a vision machine. Now, we have large models that are very good vision machines, but I feel we still don’t know the science of vision. I’ll discuss whether there is a science of vision, and present my lab’s recent efforts to describe it.

(b) The 40 year-long project.
Years ago, I developed a design for a collapsible rigid structure, with potential applications for the consumer and in robotics. We recently completed that design, and presented the work in the top conference on Human-Computer Interaction, ACM CHI 2026. I’ll describe that 40 year long project.

Bio

William T. Freeman is the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) there. He was the Associate Department Head of EECS from 2011–2014. Since 2015, he has also been a research manager in Google Research in Cambridge, MA.

His current research interests include mid-level vision and computational photography. Previous research topics include steerable filters and pyramids, orientation histograms, the generic viewpoint assumption, color constancy, computer vision for computer games, motion magnification, and belief propagation in networks with loops. He received outstanding paper awards at computer vision or machine learning conferences in 1997, 2006, 2009, 2012 and 2019, and test-of-time awards for papers from 1990, 1995, 2002, 2005, and 2012. He shared the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Physics for a consulting role with the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, which reconstructed the first image of a black hole. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAI. In 2019, he received the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award, the highest award in computer vision. He is co-author of the computer vision textbook, Computer Vision: Algorithms and Applications.