Andrew Blake (scientist)

Andrew Blake, FREng,^[1] FRS, (born 1956) is a British scientist, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh, and a leading researcher in computer vision.

Career

Andrew Blake graduated in 1977 from Trinity College, Cambridge with a B.A. in Mathematics and Electrical Sciences. After a year as a Kennedy Scholar at MIT and two years in the defence electronics industry, he studied for a PhD at the University of Edinburgh which was awarded in 1983. Until 1987 he was on the faculty of the department of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, as a Royal Society Research Fellow. From 1987 to 1999, he was on the academic staff of the Department of Engineering Science in the University of Oxford, 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 Vision Group. In 2008 he became a Deputy Managing Director at the lab, before becoming Laboratory Director in 2010.^[2]

Honours and awards

He was elected Fellow^[1] of the Royal Academy of Engineering^[1] in 1988, and Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005. In 2006 the Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him its Silver Medal. He has 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. In 2007 he was awarded the Mountbatten Medal by the IET.^[3] In 2009 he was awarded the IEEE Computer Vision Significant Researcher Award.^[4] In 2011, he and colleagues at Microsoft Research received the Royal Academy of Engineering MacRobert Award for their machine learning contribution to Microsoft Kinect human motion-capture.^[2]

References

• Royal Academy of Engineering Fellows
• Marr prize list
• Microsoft Research Cambridge
• Andrew Blake, School of Informatics, the University of Edinburgh