Michael J. Black receives PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award

Paris, Tübingen – Michael J. Black, Director of the Perceiving Systems Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, received the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision which, this year, is held in Paris. ICCV is considered to be one of the top conferences in computer vision, along with CVPR and ECCV. Meanwhile, the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award (named the Significant Researcher Award until 2013) is given to candidates whose research contributions have made a significant contribution to the advancement of computer vision. Awards are made on the basis of significant research contributions and the role of these contributions in influencing and inspiring other research. The list of past winners reads like a who's who of computer vision, with many being major figures in the field, including a Turing Award winner.

Michael Black’s work has won several awards including the IEEE Computer Society Outstanding Paper Award (1991) and Honorable Mention for the Marr Prize (1999 and 2005). Black has also won all three major test-of-time prizes in computer vision: 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.

Michael J. Black received his B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia in 1985, his M.S. from Stanford University in 1989, and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1992. After postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto, he worked at Xerox PARC as a member of research staff and area manager. From 2000 to 2010 he was on the faculty of Brown University in the Department of Computer Science (Assoc. Prof. 2000-2004, Prof. 2004-2010). From 04/2014 to 04/2016 Black was a Visiting Professor at ETH Zurich in the Electrical Engineering department.

Black is one of the founding directors of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Until 2021, he was a Distinguished Amazon Scholar. He is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tübingen and Adjunct Professor at Brown University.