PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Daniel J. Butler

Also known as D. Butler, Dan Butler

Daniel Butler's research spans computer vision, robotics, and AI-powered movement tracking. He helped build the Sintel optical-flow benchmark and worked on text-linked 3D scenes, home-robot privacy, and interactive manipulation. The Sintel paper won the 2022 ECCV Koenderink Prize. In 2023, he was a Salk bioinformatics analyst and first author of GlowTrack, which uses fluorescent markers to train AI for movement tracking. By 2024, he described himself as a researcher and software developer interested in computer vision and AI.

Works
8
Citations
2,090
h-index
6

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2012

    Sintel optical-flow benchmark

    He publishes “A Naturalistic Open Source Movie for Optical Flow Evaluation” at ECCV 2012 with Jonas Wulff, Garrett B. Stanley, and Michael J. Black; the paper turns the open-source Sintel film into a benchmark dataset for optical flow.

  2. 2013

    Text-linked 3D models

    The 2013 “3D Wikipedia” project analyzes online text and photographs to build annotated 3D models of tourist sites, with text linked to objects in the reconstructed scenes.

  3. 2015

    Privacy in robot teleoperation

    In 2015, he and his coauthors investigate privacy in home teleoperation through two surveys and a user study of how visual filters affect a remote operator’s ability to complete a task.

  4. 2017

    Human-guided robot manipulation

    The 2017 study compares interactive segmentation methods and integrates a hybrid interface into a human-in-the-loop robot manipulation system; the user study finds more efficient manipulation with a similar task-success rate.

  5. 2022

    The Koenderink Prize

    ECCV 2022 awards the Koenderink Prize to the Sintel optical-flow paper, coauthored by Butler, Jonas Wulff, Garrett B. Stanley, and Michael J. Black.

  6. 2023

    GlowTrack at Salk

    At Salk in 2023, he is a bioinformatics analyst and first author of GlowTrack, which uses fluorescent markers to generate large training sets for AI models that track movement across varied conditions.

  7. By 2024

    Researcher and software developer

    By 2024, he describes himself as a researcher and software developer whose interests include computer vision, reinforcement learning, bioinformatics, neuroscience, and AI.

Career

  1. 2023Salk Institute for Biological StudiesBioinformatics analyst
  2. 2012–2017University of Washington

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. A Naturalistic Open Source Movie for Optical Flow Evaluation2012 · Lecture notes in computer science · 1,841 citations
  2. The Privacy-Utility Tradeoff for Remotely Teleoperated Robots2015 · ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) · 119 citations
  3. Lessons and Insights from Creating a Synthetic Optical Flow Benchmark2012 · Lecture notes in computer science · 67 citations
  4. 3D Wikipedia2013 · ACM Transactions on Graphics · 42 citationsWith Luke Zettlemoyer and Steven Seitz
  5. Large-scale capture of hidden fluorescent labels for training generalizable markerless motion capture models2023 · Nature Communications · 12 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026.

  1. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes University of Washington. Our estimates of combined and median h-index at AI organizations, using current affiliations and OpenAlex records.
  2. 44% of AI career moves go from one university to anotherIncludes University of Washington. We estimate how 14,272 AI career moves link universities, companies, labs and government research centers, with net flows and the most common paths.
  3. Stanford University trained or employed 20 of the 89 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes University of Washington. Stanford University trained or employed 20 of the 89 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and employment links for major-prize and best-paper winners.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 2% to 32%Includes University of Washington. We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 2% in 1975–1979 to 32% in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Daniel J. Butler yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Main conference: list of accepted papers | ECCV 2012 eccv2012.unifi.it. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Jonas Wulff people.csail.mit.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. 3D Wikipedia: Using Online Text to Automatically Label and Navigate Reconstructed Geometry grail.cs.washington.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. The Privacy-Utility Tradeoff for Remotely Teleoperated Robots hcrlab.cs.washington.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Interactive scene segmentation for efficient human-in-the-loop robot manipulation hcrlab.cs.washington.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. ECVA | European Computer Vision Association ecva.net. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. Unleashing the power of AI to track animal behavior salk.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  8. Dan Butler djbutler.github.io. Checked 19 October 2026.