PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

David Minnen

David Minnen is an AI researcher whose work spans image compression, video compression and generative video. He studied human activity discovery at Georgia Tech and led computer-vision work on markerless hand tracking at Oblong. At Google, he coauthored methods for learned image compression and the Video Compression Transformer, then contributed to VideoPoet, a language model for zero-shot video generation. VideoPoet received an ICML 2024 Best Paper Award. As of October 2026, he works in machine intelligence and machine perception at Google Research.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2001–2008

    Human activity discovery

    He begins research in human activity discovery at Georgia Tech in 2001 with Professor Irfan Essa. He earns a Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in 2008; an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship funds his work on unsupervised time-series analysis.

  2. 2011

    Computer vision at Oblong

    In 2011, he leads Oblong's research and development on markerless hand tracking and gesture recognition.

  3. 2017–2018

    Neural image compression

    At Google Research, he coauthors a 2017 recurrent neural network method for full-resolution image compression. In 2018, he coauthors a learned image compression model that combines autoregressive and hierarchical priors.

  4. 2020

    Scale-space flow for video

    In 2020, he coauthors Scale-Space Flow, a video compression method that adds a scale parameter to optical flow so the network can model uncertainty.

  5. 2022

    A video compression transformer

    In 2022, he coauthors VCT, which uses a transformer to model dependencies among frame representations for video compression.

  6. December 2023

    VideoPoet video generation

    In December 2023, he coauthors VideoPoet, an autoregressive language model trained across video, image, audio and text. The system supports text-to-video, image-to-video, video-to-audio and video stylization.

  7. 2024

    An ICML Best Paper Award

    VideoPoet receives an ICML Best Paper Award in 2024.

  8. As of October 2026

    Research at Google

    As of October 2026, he works in machine intelligence and machine perception at Google Research.

Career

  1. NowGoogle Research
  2. From 2011Oblong

Education

  1. 2008Georgia Institute of TechnologyPhD

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes David Minnen. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Google. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  3. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Google. We estimate that Google holds the highest combined h-index at 8,016, while universities account for 73% of the deduplicated total across AI organizations.
  4. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Google. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of David Minnen yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Thad Starner Teaching sites.cc.gatech.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Safely Boosting Retirement Income by Harmonizing Drawdown Paths financialplanningassociation.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. IEEE International Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction, ICCV 2011 disi.unitn.it. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Google at CVPR 2017 research.google. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Joint Autoregressive and Hierarchical Priors for Learned Image Compression arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Scale-Space Flow for End-to-End Optimized Video Compression openaccess.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. VCT: A Video Compression Transformer proceedings.neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. VideoPoet: A large language model for zero-shot video generation research.google. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. David Minnen research.google. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. ICML 2024 Awards icml.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.