Professor Andrew Blake  AI Consultant

Andrew Blake is a pioneer in AI vision --the theory and algorithms that allow computers to behave as seeing machines. He trained in mathematics and electrical engineering in Cambridge UK and at MIT, and studied for a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. He was an academic for 18 years, first in Edinburgh and later as Professor of Information Engineering at Oxford University. He joined Microsoft in 1999 to start a Computer Vision group, before becoming Director of Microsoft’s Cambridge Laboratory in 2010 and a Microsoft Distinguished Scientist

In particular he has worked on segmentation as optimization, visual tracking as probabilistic inference, and on real-time, 3D vision – see  his publications.  Some of the main themes are captured in books: “Visual Reconstruction” with A.Zisserman (1987, MIT press), “Active Vision” with A. Yuille (1992, MIT Press),   “Active Contours” with M. Isard (1998, Springer-Verlag) and "Markov Random Fields for Vision and Image Processing" with C. Rother and P. Kohli (2011, MIT Press).  

He won the prize of the European Conference on Computer Vision twice (with R. Cipolla 1992 and M. Isard 1996) and the IEEE David Marr Prize (with K. Toyama) in 2001. The Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him their Silver Medal in 2006, and in 2007 he received the IET Mountbatten Medal (previously awarded to computer pioneers Maurice Wilkes and Tim Berners-Lee, amongst others.) He was named a Distinguished Researcher in Computer Vision by the IEEE in 2009. In 2011, with colleagues at Microsoft Research, he received the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Gold Medal for the machine learning at the heart of the Microsoft Kinect 3D camera.  

In 2010, he was elected to the council of the Royal Society and was appointed to the board of the EPSRC in 2012. He was Director at the Alan Turing Institute 2015-8. He has been  Honorary Professor of Machine Intelligence at the University of Cambridge since 2007, is a Fellow of Clare Hall, and has been a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering since 1998. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005 and chaired the Royal Society report of 2019 on the Dynamics of Data Science Skills.

Since 2017 Andrew Blake has been a consultant in Artificial Intelligence, serving as an adviser to the CEO of Siemens AG from 2015-19. He established Samsung’s AI laboratory in Cambridge UK in 2018, and has established or advises various AI startup companies in video-conferencing, self-driving and agritech.

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