Michael J. Black
Director at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Distinguished Amazon Scholar
My research focuses on understanding humans and their behavior in video. I work at the boundary of computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics. I'm particularly interested in how people move and how this movement relates to their goals.
Michael Black received his B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia (1985), his M.S. from Stanford (1989), and his Ph.D. from Yale University (1992). He has held positions at the University of Toronto, Xerox PARC, and Brown Unviversity. He is one of the founding directors at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, where he leads the Perceiving Systems department. He is a Distinguished Amazon Scholar, an Honorarprofessor at the University of Tuebingen, and Adjunct Professor at Brown University. His work has won several awards including the IEEE Computer Society Outstanding Paper Award (1991), Honorable Mention for the Marr Prize (1999 and 2005), the 2010 Koenderink Prize, and the 2013 Helmholtz Prize. He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2013 he co-founded Body Labs Inc., which was acquired by Amazon in 2017.