Shimon Ullman

Shimon Ullman was born in 1948 in Jerusalem

Ullman was born in Jerusalem in 1948. His mother, Lisa Ullman, taught classical studies at the Hebrew University, and his father, David Theodor Ullman, was a nephrologist at Hadassah hospital. He grew up in the Rehavia neighborhood and attended the Hebrew Gymnasium Rehavia.

He served in the Israeli Air Force as a fighter pilot. He took part in the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War.

He began studying at the Hebrew University in 1970 and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics, physics and biology in 1973. He then went to MIT, where he received a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science in 1977 under David Marr.

From 1986 to 1993 he was a full professor at the MIT artificial intelligence lab, and since 1986 he has also been a professor at the Weizmann Institute. He headed its Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from 1994 to 2003. His work covers object and face recognition, and with Christof Koch he proposed the idea of a visual saliency map.

In 1983 he co-founded Orbot, which merged into Orbotech in 1992, and he was its chief scientist until 2004. He received the Rumelhart Prize in 2008, the EMET Prize in 2014 and the Israel Prize in 2015.