MODVIS 2026: Computational and Mathematical Models in Vision
A satellite workshop to the 2026 Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting

May 13-14, 2026

MODVIS 2026 will be held at the VSS conference venue (the Tradewinds Island Resorts in St. Pete Beach, FL). We hope you will consider participating; we are providing this heads-up concerning the dates so that those of you who are interested can take them into consideration when making travel plans. The organization will be essentially identical to the previous workshops.

For those of you wishing to stay at the Tradewinds resort for the workshop, we suggest booking your room early. To find out more about Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting visit their website.

---

MODVIS is a small workshop dedicated to the investigation of formal models in vision research. We intend this to be a very special workshop, one that fills a critical niche. Specifically, we hope that it will:

• Help move our field forward, because substantial progress in any field is not possible without formal theories. Modeling work at VSS and similar conferences is scattered among the diverse parallel sessions, making it nearly impossible to keep up with new developments. Our proposed format will bring a diverse group of modelers together.
• Facilitate interactions among theoretically-minded researchers. A discussion among modelers always goes beyond phenomena and effects. Many papers at ordinary meetings rarely go beyond the data. Our intent is to focus on the role of mechanisms (vision algorithms).
• Encourage people to present their formal theories and models in some detail (presentations may be slightly longer than at VSS). We all would like to see more equations and cost functions and to be able to discuss the stability and complexity of our models. Time will be available to do this within the sessions and on the beach between them. Models used in only one part of the field could prove to be very useful in another.
• Attract machine vision people interested in human vision, again, because our current knowledge of human vision has finally reached the point where our models can actually be used by seeing machines.
• Keep us up-to-date with modeling across all specialized areas within vision. This will be beneficial for those of us who teach. Note that one could offer a graduate seminar in vision every year based on the talks that will be presented at the kind of conference we are proposing.
• Help integrate vision into a single field: We think that solving the obvious binding problem in our field should be possible, and even helpful, for solving the binding problem in the brain.

---

Organizers (in alphabetical order)

Jeffrey B. Mulligan, Freelance Vision Scientist, jbmull@gmail.com

Tim Oleskiw, University of Regina, oleskiw@uregina.ca

Zygmunt Pizlo, UC Irvine, zpizlo@uci.edu

Anne B. Sereno, Purdue University, asereno@purdue.edu

Qasim Zaidi, SUNY College of Optometry, qz@sunyopt.edu

Mengmi Zhang, Nanyang Technological University, mengmi.zhang@ntu.edu.sg