Godfried Toussaint
Professor of Computer Science
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BSc Tulsa University; MASc University of British Columbia; PhD University of British Columbia
Research Areas: Algorithms, Computational Geometry, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Music Information Retrieval, Pattern Recognition, Pattern Analysis, Design
Godfried Toussaint was a Professor and the Head of the Computer Science Program at New York University Abu Dhabi. He was also an affiliate researcher in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA, USA. He taught and did research in the School of Computer Science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada in the areas of information theory, pattern recognition, textile-pattern analysis and design, computational geometry, machine learning, music information retrieval, and computational music theory.
In 2005, he became a researcher in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology, in the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. He was a founder and co-founder of several annual international conferences and workshops, including the ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry, and the Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry.
He was an editor of several journals, including Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, the International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications, ISRN Geometry, and the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. He received several distinguished awards including a two-year Killam Fellowship from the Canada Council for the Arts for a project on Movable Separability of Objects in Space, and a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University for the project Phylogenetic Analysis of the Musical Rhythms of the World, where he spent one year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and one year in the Music Department at Harvard.
His research on the phylogenetic analysis of musical rhythms has been reported in several media and was the focus of two Canadian television programs. His book titled: The Geometry of Musical Rhythm was published by Chapman-Hall/CRC Press in January 2013.
In 2018, he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science from the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Computer Science.