Dr John Potvin received his PhD in 2005 from Queen's University and has taught at a number of universities including York University and the University of Toronto and in 2005 was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Guelph. In 2012, he came to Concordia University as Associate Professor and teaches on the intersections of art, design and fashion. His research largely while not exclusively focuses on the ways the male body, competing masculinities and dissident sexualities are performed, represented, memorialized and perceived through various modern design and material and visual cultures since the late 19th century in Europe and North America. He has published several essays in books and journals including The Journal of Design History, Journal of Interior Design, Senses and Society, Genders, Home Cultures, Visual Culture in Britain and Fashion Theory.
He is the author of Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding (Ashgate 2008), Giorgio Armani: Empire of the Senses (Ashgate 2013) and, more recently, Bachelors of a Different Sort: Queer Aesthetics, Material Culture and the Modern Interior in Britain (Manchester University Press 2014), which won the Historians of British Art Book Prize. 2020 also saw the release of Deco Dandy: Designing Masculinity in 1920s Paris (Manchester UP) which explores the fashion, painting, performance and design cultures of the much-neglected interwar dandy.
In addition to being editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion (Routledge 2009) and Oriental Interiors: Design, Identity, Space (Bloomsbury 2015) he is also co-editor of both Material Cultures, 1740-1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (Ashgate 2009) and Fashion, Interior Design and the Contours of Modern Identity (Ashgate 2010). He serves on the editorial boards of several international peer-reviewed journals and was book review editor for Interiors: Interiors, Design and Architecture (2011-13).
He is currently preparing a manuscript for Manchester UP, The Gender of Interior Design: From Professionalization to Activism, 1969-2019, which is the result of a four-year SSHRC Insight Grant. In 2021 he was awarded a 4-year SSHRC Insight Grant to investigate 'Primitivism and Interior Design: Art Deco, Hybridity and Decolonization of the Modern Interior in France, 1909-1939'.
Research & Teaching Interests
§ The cultures of modernism in art, design and fashion
§ Sexuality, gender and design
§ Histories and theories of the interior
§ Material and visual cultures of masculinity
§ 2SLGBTQQIPAA visual and material practices
§ The design cultures of Orientalism & Primitivism
§ The bodies, space and time of design
§ Fashion, legacy and the spaces of display
§ Fashion and tailoring in the age of globalization
Seminars
Suen has given 195 seminars at major computer industries and various government and academic institutions around the world. He has been the principal investigator of 30industrial/government research contracts, and has received many research grants from national and provincial funding agencies.
For More Information, you may visit the web page at: http://www.cenparmi.concordia.ca/
Present positions
Director: Centre for Pattern Recognition and Machine Intelligence (CENPARMI)
Hon. Concordia Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence & Pattern Recognition
Advisory position
Member, Advisory Board, 2006-2014, IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition)
Member, Advisory Committee, 2006-2012, ICPR (International Conference on Pattern Recognition)
Member, Advisory Committee, 2007-, National Lab of Pattern Recognition, Academia Sinica, Beijing
Fellowships of professional/academic societies
Fellow, Academy of Sciences, Royal Society of Canada(since 1995)
Fellow, IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.(since 1986)
Fellow, IAPR, International Association for Pattern Recognition (since 1994)
Editorial work
Editorial Board: Pattern Recognition and Image Processing,International Journal, Russian Academy, 2016
Guest Editor: Special Issue on Papers from Mexican Conf on Pattern Recog. Neural Computing, 2016
Appointed Editor of Book Series on Language Processing, Pattern Recognition,and Intelligent Systems, World Scientific Pub., 2015
He is the Emeritus Editor-in-Chief of refereed journal Pattern Recognition
Advisory Editor of refereed journal Pattern Recognition Letters
Associate Editor of 3 other refereed journals related to pattern recognition, AI, signal and image processing, expert systems and their applications.
Founder of conferences and awards
Established a permanent CENPARMI scholarship for outstanding graduate students
Founder of ICDAR (International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, 1991-)
Founder of ICFHR (International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, formerly IWFHR, 1990-)
Founder of VI (Vision Interface,1988-2003).
Founder of the ICDAR Awards (maximum of three awards per ICDAR conference, to honour outstanding young and/or established researchers in the field of DAR, 1997-).
Honorary Chair, General Chair or Co-Chair, Chair or Program Chair, or Committee Member
Recent years
Conference Chair & Keynote Speaker, 2nd Global Summit and Expo on Multimedia & Applications,Aug. 15-16, 2016, London, UK
Honorary Chair: Int. Conf. on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition Shenzhen, China, 2016 (Nov. 2016)
Honorary Chair & Keynote Speaker: Mexicon Conf. on Pattern Recognition, 2014
ANNPR: General Chair, Artificial Neural Network on Pattern Recognition. Montreal, Canada, Oct. 2014.
MCPR: Honorary Chair, Mexico Conference in Pattern Recognition, Cancun, Mexico, June 2014
ACM RACS: Honorary Chair, Research in Adaptive Converging Systems, Montreal, Canada, Oct. 2013
ICFHR: Honorary Chair, The 13th Int. Conf. on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, ICFHR 2012, Bari, Italy, Sept. 2012
ICFHR: General Chair, International Conference on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, Montreal, 2008
ICDAR: Honorary Chair, International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Curitiba, Brazil, 2007
IWFHR: Honorary Chair, International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, 2002
ICPR: General Chair, International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Quebec City, 2002
Pre-2000
ICDAR: General Chair, International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, Montreal, Aug. 1995
IWFHR: General Chair, International Workshop on Frontiers in Handwriting Recognition, Montreal, April 1990
ICCPCO: General Chair, the International Conference on Computer Processing of Chinese and Oriental Languages, Toronto, August 1988
President and other authority of national and international organizations
CIPPRS: President, 6 yrs, Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society
CLCS: President, 3 yrs, and Vice-President, 3 yrs, International Chinese Language Computer Society,
IAPR: Governor and Committee Member, 14 yrs, Technical Committee Chair, 4 yrs, International Association for Pattern Recognition,
RTUA: Director, 2 yrs, Recognition Technology Users Association, U.S.A.,
CSA: Chairman of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Committee for 10 yrs, Canadian Standards Association
Seminars, public lectures and supervision
Suen has given 195 invited addresses and seminars at different universities and industries around the world,including: Burroughs (USA), Fujitsu (Japan), NEC (Japan), Xerox (USA),Microsoft (USA), Philips, Bell Canada, ITRI (Taiwan), ELSAG (Italy),Chinese Academies of Sciences, universities, government and other agencies.
Suen has guided/hosted 87 visiting scientists and professors, and has supervised 86 doctoral and master's graduates.
External Examiner: Ph.D. Thesis, University of Macau, China, 2016 (will attend)
