Ullman's main research area is the study of vision processing by both humans and machines.

Specifically, he focuses on object and facial recognition, and has made a number of key insights in this field, including with Christof Koch the idea of a visual saliency map in the mammalian visual system to regulate selective spatial attention.

[4] Ullman is the former head of the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizmann Institute.

Ullman was awarded the 2008 David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science.

[7][8] In 2019 he won the Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Achievement Award in the field of computer vision.