Professor
Andrew Blake AI Consultant
Andrew Blake is a pioneer in the development of the
theory and algorithms that make it possible for computers to behave as seeing
machines. He is especially
interested in segmentation as optimization, in visual tracking as probabilistic
inference, and in real-time, 3D vision – see
his principal
publications on these topics.
Some
of the main themes of his work are captured in books including “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 trained in mathematics and electrical engineering
in Cambridge UK and at MIT, and studied for a
doctorate
in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. He was an academic
for 18 years, in Edinburgh and Oxford, ultimately as Professor of Information
Engineering at Oxford University. He joined Microsoft in 1999 to found the
Computer Vision group in Cambridge,, before becoming Director of Microsoft’s Cambridge
Laboratory in 2010 and a Microsoft Distinguished Scientist.
Currently he is a consultant in Artificial
Intelligence. In particular he is Chairman of Samsung’s AI Research Centre
SAIC
in Cambridge UK.
He is consultant and Scientific Adviser to the
FiveAI
autonomous driving company, and serves as an
adviser to Siemens.
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 and is a
Fellow of Clare Hall. He has been a Fellow
of the
Royal Academy of Engineering
since 1998 and Fellow of the
Royal Society
since 2005.
He twice won the prize of the European Conference on
Computer Vision, with
R. Cipolla in 1992 and with
M. Isard
in 1996, and was awarded the
IEEE David
Marr Prize (jointly with K. Toyama) in
2001. The Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him their
Silver Medal in 2006, and in 2007 he
received the Institution of Engineering and Technology
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.
Exactly 80 years after Einstein, in 2014, he gave the
Gibbs lecture
at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (see
transcript)
–
the 6th British scientist to do so in 90
years. The BCS awarded him its Lovelace Medal and
prize lecture
in 2017. He holds honorary doctorates at the University of Edinburgh and the
University of Sheffield.
Contact:
Email