William T. Freeman is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT. A member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he joined the MIT the faculty in September, 2001.

From 1992 - 2001 he worked at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), in Cambridge, MA, most recently as Sr. Research Scientist and Associate Director. He studied computer vision for his PhD in 1992 from the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, and received a BS in physics and MS in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1979, and an MS in applied physics from Cornell in 1981.

His current research interests include machine learning applied to computer vision, Bayesian models of visual perception, and interactive applications of computer vision. In 1997, he received the Outstanding Paper prize at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition for work on applying bilinear models to "separating style and content". Previous research topics include steerable filters and pyramids, the generic viewpoint assumption, color constancy, and computer vision for computer games. He holds 15 patents.

From 1981 - 1987, he worked at the Polaroid Corporation. There he co-developed an electronic printer (Polaroid Palette) , and developed algorithms for color image reconstruction which are used in Polaroid's electronic camera . In 1987-88, Dr. Freeman was a Foreign Expert at the Taiyuan University of Technology, P. R. of China.

Dr. Freeman was an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (IEEE-PAMI), and is a member of the IEEE PAMI TC Awards Committee. He has been active in the program or organizing committees of the International Conference on Face and Gesture Recognition, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), and SIGGRAPH.