Andrew Blake (born 12 March 1956) 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 Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

, honorary professor at the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

, Fellow of

Clare Hall, Cambridge Clare Hall is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1966 by Clare College, Clare Hall is a college for advanced study, admitting only postgraduate students alongside postdoctoral researchers and fellows. It was est ...

, and a leading researcher in computer vision.

Education

Blake was educated at

Rugby School Rugby School is a Public school (United Kingdom), private boarding school for pupils aged 13–18, located in the town of Rugby, Warwickshire in England. Founded in 1567 as a free grammar school for local boys, it is one of the oldest independ ...

and graduated in 1977 from

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any ...

with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mathematics and Electrical Sciences. After a year as a

Kennedy Scholar Kennedy Scholarships provide full funding for up to ten British post-graduate students to study at either Harvard University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Susan Hockfield, the sixteenth president of MIT, described the scho ...

at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and two years in the defence electronics industry, he studied at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh (, ; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a Public university, public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the City of Edinburgh Council, town council under th ...

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 The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society ...

. From 1987 to 1999, he was on the academic staff of the Department of Engineering Science in the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

, 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 to 2018 he was director at the Alan Turing Institute. Since 2018 he has been the inaugural chair of the Samsung AI Centre in Cambridge.

Honours and awards

Blake was elected

Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) is an award and Scholarship, fellowship for engineers who are recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering as being the best and brightest engineers, inventors and technologists in United K ...

(FREng) in 1998,

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

(FRS) in 2005 and an

IEEE Fellow , the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and ot ...

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 3 May 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 ...

in 1992 and with M. Isard in 1996, and was awarded the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. 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, Am ...

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) Computer Vision Distinguished Researcher Award. In 2010 Blake was elected to the council of the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

. 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 discontinued line of motion sensing input devices produced by Microsoft and first released in 2010. The devices generally contain RGB color model, RGB cameras, and Thermographic camera, infrared projectors and detectors that map dep ...

human motion-capture. In 2012 he was elected to the board of the

EPSRC The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a British Research Council that provides government funding for grants to undertake research and postgraduate degrees in engineering and the physical sciences, mainly to univers ...

and also received an honorary degree of Doctor of Science from the

. In 2013 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Engineering from the

University of Sheffield The University of Sheffield (informally Sheffield University or TUOS) is a public university, public research university in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Its history traces back to the foundation of Sheffield Medical School in 1828, Fir ...

. 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 The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Press publishes a number of academic journals and has been a pioneer in the Open Ac ...

. * (Ed.) ''Active Vision''. 1992. MIT Press. * ''Visual Reconstruction''. 1987. MIT Press.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Blake, Andrew Computer vision researchers Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni 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 Fellows of the IEEE People educated at Rugby School