William Eric Leifur Grimson (born 1953 in Estevan, Saskatchewan, Canada), also known as W. Eric L. Grimson, is a Canadian-born computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in computer vision. He completed a Bachelor of Science at the University of Regina and a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980 under the supervision of doctoral advisor David Marr, with a thesis titled "Computing shape using a theory of human stereo vision". His doctoral students include Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood, and he is also associated with Ellen Hildreth.

At MIT, Grimson served as head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from 2005 to 2011.^[1,2] From 2011 to 2014, under leadership including Susan Hockfield and L. Rafael Reif, he served as the 5th Chancellor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, succeeding Phillip Clay and preceding Cynthia Barnhart, and currently serves as MIT's Chancellor for Academic Advancement.^[1,2] His honors include being named an AAAI Fellow in 2000, an IEEE Fellow in 2004, and an ACM Fellow in 2014, and his academic profile is maintained at www.csail.mit.edu/person/eric-grimson.

Grimson was born in 1953 in Estevan, Saskatchewan. His father William was the principal of Estevan Collegiate Institute, the local high school, and his mother was an eminent musician and taught piano performance and music theory. The family later moved to Regina, where he attended Campbell Collegiate and the University of Regina, graduating in 1975 with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and physics with high honours.^[3,4] In 1980, he received his PhD in mathematics from MIT. His doctoral dissertation, "Computing Shape Using a Theory of Human Stereo Vision", was on computer vision, a field that would become the focus of his research career. An expanded version of the dissertation was published by MIT Press in 1981 as From Images to Surfaces: A Computational Study of the Human Early Vision System, which was endorsed by Tomaso Poggio and Noam Chomsky.^[5,6]

After completing his PhD, Grimson worked as a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (now CSAIL) before joining the university's faculty in 1984. He eventually rose to Bernard Gordon Chair of Medical Engineering and holds a joint appointment as a Radiology Lecturer at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital.^[7] After serving as Education Officer and Associate Department Head, he was appointed Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and served from 2005 to 2011. In February 2011, he was appointed Chancellor of MIT, succeeding Phillip Clay, and took up his post the following month and served until 2014 when he was replaced by Cynthia Barnhart.^[8]

Grimson has "long prized teaching" and has taught introductory computer science courses for 25 years, in addition to advising doctoral students and teaching advanced classes. He also teaches two introductory computer science courses on edX.^[9] In his current position as Chancellor for Academic Advancement, Grimson reports directly to MIT President Sally Kornbluth. His role is to gather faculty and student input on MIT's fundraising priorities and to communicate these priorities to donors and alumni.^[1,11]

Grimson is married to Wellesley College professor Ellen Hildreth. The couple have two sons.^[6]

Honors include being named an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Fellow in 2000 for contributions to the theory and application of computer vision, ranging from algorithms for binocular stereo, surface interpolation, and object recognition to deployed systems for computer-assisted surgery. In 2004, fellow status was awarded by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for contributions to surface reconstruction, object-recognition, image database indexing, and medical applications. Fellow status was also awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery in 2014 for contributions to computer vision and medical image computing.

Grimson published From Images to Surfaces: A Computational Study of the Human Early Visual System with MIT Press in 1981, a work dedicated to David Marr and endorsed by Tomaso Poggio and Noam Chomsky. In 1989, he co-edited AI in the 1980s and Beyond: An MIT Survey with Ramesh S. Patil, published by MIT Press. He presented the abstract "Image Guided Surgery" in 2001 at Stanford University's Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision. In 2003, MIT Press published his book Object Recognition by Computer: The Role of Geometric Constraints.