Michael J. Black

Michael J. Black
Michael J. Black
	Michael J. Black; Director, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany
Born	June 1962 (age 63–64); North Carolina, United States
Alma mater	University of British Columbia (1985, B.Sc., Honours Computer Science); Stanford University (1989, Masters in Computer Science); Yale University (1992, PhD in Computer Science);
Known for	Computer Vision; Computer Graphics; Machine Learning;
Awards	Member National Academy of Engineering; ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Test-of-Time Award (2024, 2025); Mark Everingham Prize (2025); Member, German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina; PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award (2023); Longuet-Higgins prize (2020); Helmholtz Prize (2013); Koenderink Prize (2010, 2022); Marr Prize, Honorable Mention, ICCV (2005); Marr Prize, Honorable Mention, ICCV (1999); IEEE Outstanding Paper Award (1991); Foreign Member, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
	Scientific career
Fields	Computer Science ;
Institutions	Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems; University of Tuebingen
Thesis	Robust Incremental Optical Flow (1992)
Doctoral advisor	P. Anandan
Doctoral students	Stefan Roth (2007);
Website	is.mpg.de/ps/person/black

Michael J. Black is an American computer scientist currently working in Tübingen, Germany. He is a founding director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems where he leads the Perceiving Systems Department in research focused on computer vision, machine learning, and computer graphics. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Tübingen.

Black's work has been awarded six test-of-time prizes including the ACM SIGGRAPH Asia Test-of-Time Award (2024 and 2025) and all three such awards in computer vision, including the Koenderink Prize at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) in 2010 and 2022, the Helmholtz Prize at the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in 2013, and the Longuet-Higgins Prize at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in 2022. In 2023 he received the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award.