Andrew Blake (born 12 March 1956) FREng, FRS, One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: is a British scientist, former laboratory director of

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

Cambridge and Microsoft Distinguished Scientist, former director of the Alan Turing Institute, Chair of the Samsung AI Centre in Cambridge, honorary professor at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a leading researcher in computer vision.

Education

Blake was educated at Rugby School and graduated in 1977 from Trinity College, Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics and Electrical Sciences. After a year as a Kennedy Scholar at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

and two years in the defence electronics industry, he studied at the University of Edinburgh for a PhD, which was awarded in 1983 and supervised by

Donald Michie Donald Michie (; 11 November 1923 – 7 July 2007) was a British researcher in artificial intelligence. During World War II, Michie worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, contributing to the effort to solve " Tunny ...

Career and research

Until 1987 he was on the faculty of the department of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, as a

Royal Society University Research Fellow __NOTOC__ The Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) is a research fellowship awarded to outstanding early career scientists in the United Kingdom who are judged by the Royal Society to have the potential to become leaders in their fie ...

. From 1987 to 1999, he was on the academic staff of the Department of Engineering Science in the University of Oxford, where he became a professor in 1996, and was a Royal Society Senior Research Fellow for 1998-9. In 1999 he moved to Microsoft Research Cambridge as senior research scientist, where he founded the Computer Vision Group. In 2008 he became a deputy managing director at the lab, before becoming laboratory director in 2010. From 2015-2018 he was director at the

Alan Turing Institute The Alan Turing Institute is the United Kingdom's national institute for data science and artificial intelligence, founded in 2015 and largely funded by the UK government. It is named after Alan Turing, the British mathematician and computing ...

. Since 2018 he has been inaugural chair of the Samsung AI Centre in Cambridge.

Honours and awards

Blake was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in 1998, Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2005 and an IEEE Fellow in 2008. In 2006 the Royal Academy of Engineering awarded Andrew its Silver Medal. He has twice won the prize of the European Conference on Computer Vision, with

Roberto Cipolla Roberto Cipolla (born 1963), , FREng, is a British researcher in computer vision and Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Education Cipolla was born in Solihull, England and attended Langley School in Solih ...

in 1992 and with M. Isard in 1996, and was awarded the IEEE David Marr Prize (jointly with

Kentaro Toyama Kentaro Toyama is a computer scientist and international development researcher, who works on the relationship of technology and global development. He is the W. K. Kellogg Professor at the University of Michigan School of InformationMcDonald, Amy ...

for their paper on ''Probabilistic Tracking with Exemplars in a Metric Space'') in 2001. In 2007 he was awarded the

Mountbatten Medal The IET Mountbatten Medal is awarded annually for an outstanding contribution, or contributions over a period, to the promotion of electronics or information technology and their application. The Medal was established by the National Electronics C ...

by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET). In 2009 he was awarded the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

Computer Vision Distinguished Researcher Award. In 2010 Blake was elected to the council of the Royal Society. In 2011, he and colleagues at Microsoft Research received the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert gold medal for their machine learning contribution to Microsoft

Kinect Kinect is a line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB cameras, and infrared projectors and detectors that map depth through either structured light or time of flig ...

human motion-capture. In 2012 he was elected to the board of the EPSRC and also received an honorary degree of Doctor of Science from the University of Edinburgh. In 2013 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Engineering from the University of Sheffield. In 2014, Blake gave the Josiah Willard Gibbs lecture at the Joint Mathematics Meetings.

Publications

* ''Markov Random Fields for Vision and Image Processing''. 2011. MIT Press. * (Ed.) ''Active Vision''. 1992. MIT Press. * ''Visual Reconstruction''. 1987. MIT Press.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Blake, Andrew Computer vision researchers Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Kennedy Scholarships Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Academics of the University of Edinburgh Academics of the University of Oxford Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering Fellows of Clare Hall, Cambridge Living people 1956 births British mathematicians British electrical engineers British computer scientists Fellow Members of the IEEE