Michael J. Black

In 2018, Meshcapade GmbH spun out of his group. The start-up focuses on licensing technology developed at MPI-IS and providing services.

2017–present: In 2017, with the acquisition of Body Labs by Amazon, Black joined Amazon as a Distinguished Amazon Scholar on a part-time basis.

Related to human pose, shape, and activity, Black has contributed to the SURREAL dataset of human motions, the JHMDB dataset of human actions, and the FAUST dataset of 3D body shapes. FAUST received the Dataset Award from the Eurographics Symposium on Geometry Processing (SGP), 2016.

In 2015, he proposed an initiative that has since become Cyber Valley, which aims to make the Stuttgart-Tübingen region of Germany a world leader in AI research and applications. He is on the research consortium's Executive Board and serves as its spokesperson.

In 2013, a team from Black's group spun out Body Labs which commercialized 3D body model technology for the clothing and games industry. Black was a co-founder and investor. Body Labs was acquired by Amazon.com in 2017.

2011–present: In 2011, Black became a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and one of the founding directors of the new MPI for Intelligent Systems.

His current work focuses on modeling and estimating human shape and pose from images and video. His team was the first to fit a learned 3D human body model to multi-camera image data at CVPR 2007, under clothing at ECCV 2008, from a single image at ICCV 2009, and from RGB-D data at ICCV 2011.

His early focus on statistical modeling of motion, particularly at motion discontinuities, led to two other prize papers. His work with David Fleet on the "Probabilistic Detection and Tracking of Motion Boundaries" won honorable mention for the Marr Prize at ICCV'99. Black's work with Stefan Roth "On the spatial statistics of optical flow" received honorable mention for the Marr Prize at ICCV 2005.

In the 2000s, Black worked with John Donoghue and others at Brown University to create the technology behind the BrainGate neural prosthetics technology. Black and colleagues developed Bayesian methods to decode neural signals from motor cortex. The team was the first to use Kalman filtering and particle filtering to decode motor cortical ensemble activity.  With these Bayesian decoding methods, the team demonstrated the successful point-and-click control of a computer cursor by a human with paralysis and the decoding of full arm and hand movement in non-human primates.

Black is best known for his work on human motion and shape estimation. With Hedvig Sidenbladh and David Fleet, he introduced the use of particle filtering for tracking 3D articulated human motion. This work was awarded the Koenderink Koenderink Prize for Fundamental Contributions in Computer Vision at ECCV 2000.

2000–2011: In 2000, Black joined the faculty of Brown University as an Associate Professor of Computer Science (with tenure). In 2004, he was promoted to Full Professor.

In 1993, Black and Jepson used mixture models to represent optical flow fields with multiple motions (also called "layered" optical flow). This introduced the use of Expectation Maximization (EM) to the field of computer vision.

1993-2000: In 1993, Black joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) as a member of research staff. He worked in the Image Understanding Area, led by Daniel Huttenlocher. In 1996, he took over management from Huttenlocher. He started the Digital Video Analysis Area in 1998.  

1992–1993: Black did post-doctoral work at the University of Toronto as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science (Contractually Limited Term Appointment). He was supervised by Allan Jepson. During his time there, he received the Computer Science Students' Union Teaching Award.

A version of this work received the IEEE Outstanding Paper Award at CVPR1991 and the Helmholtz Prize at ICCV 2013 for work that has "stood the test of time".

1989–1992: During this period, Black pursued his PhD at Yale and was supported by a NASA Graduate Fellowship. He completed his PhD at the NASA Ames Research Center in the Human Factors Research Division led by Andrew (Beau) Watson. At Yale, he was advised by P. Anandan and Drew McDermott.

1985–1989: After his bachelor's degree, Black moved to the Bay Area and worked as a software engineer at GTE Government Systems and Advanced Decision Systems (ADS) developing expert systems on the Xerox and Symbolics Lisp machines. During this time, he completed his Master's of Computer Science in Symbolic and Heuristic Computation through the Honors Co-Op Program at Stanford. His advisor was John McCarthy.