Andrew Blake
Distinguished Scientist
Laboratory Director
Microsoft Research Cambridge
Microsoft Corp.
Andrew Blake is the Laboratory Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, England. He joined Microsoft in 1999 as a Senior Researcher to found the Computer Vision group. In 2008 he became a Deputy Laboratory Director at the lab, before assuming his current position in 2010.
Andrew graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1977 with a BA 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 doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, which was awarded in 1983.
He was on the Computer Science faculty at the University of Edinburgh from 1983-87 and then joined the faculty of the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford, where he became a Professor in 1996. He held a Royal Society Senior Research Fellowship from 1998-1999. Andrew has been a visiting Professor of Engineering with the University of Oxford and was appointed honorary Professor of Machine Intelligence at the University of Cambridge in 2007.
He was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 1998 and Fellow of the Royal Society in 2005. In 2006, the Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him its Silver Medal for advances “in visual segmentation and reconstruction, and in visual motion tracking”. In 2007, Andrew was elected Fellow of the IEEE and was also the recipient of the IET Mountbatten Medal. In 2010, Andrew was elected to the council of the Royal Society. 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. In 2012, Andrew was elected to the board of the EPSRC.
Andrew has published several books including “Visual Reconstruction” with A. Zisserman (MIT press), “Active Vision” with Alan Yuille (MIT Press) and “Active Contours” with Michael Isard (Springer-Verlag). He researches the probabilistic principles of computer vision software, with applications to motion capture, user interface, image editing, remote collaboration and medical imaging.
