Michael J. Black

Michael J. Black (born June 1962 in North Carolina) is an American computer vision researcher known for work on optical flow, 3D body modeling and neural decoding. He earned a BSc honours degree in computer science from the University of British Columbia in 1985, an MS from Stanford University in 1989 under John McCarthy, and a PhD from Yale University in 1992 under P. Anandan with a thesis on robust incremental optical flow. He worked as a software engineer at GTE Government Systems and Advanced Decision Systems before his PhD, taught briefly at the University of Toronto, spent 1993 to 2000 as a researcher at Xerox PARC managing its Image Understanding Area from 1996, then moved to Brown University as associate then full professor. Since 2011 he has been founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and an honorary professor at the University of Tubingen, and from 2017 to 2021 he also served part time as a Distinguished Amazon Scholar following the acquisition of Body Labs, a company he co-founded. His optical flow algorithms using robust statistical estimation have been used in visual effects for films including What Dreams May Come and The Matrix Reloaded, and his team created the SMPL three-dimensional human body model in 2015 along with widely used extensions and benchmark datasets including the Middlebury Flow and MPI-Sintel datasets. He has received the Helmholtz Prize, the Koenderink Prize, the Longuet-Higgins Prize and the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award.