PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Mark Finocchio

Also known as M. Finocchio

Mark Finocchio is a computer-vision researcher whose coauthored pose-recognition work helped bring real-time body tracking to Kinect. In September 2008, he asked Microsoft Research for help with a planned game accessory that could track bodies; in June 2011, he coauthored a CVPR method to predict 3D body joints from one depth image, which won CVPR’s Best Paper Award. He also coauthored a 2011 paper on parallelizing Kinect’s body-parts classifier. His patents cover an on-demand property system and machine-learning classifier training, and CVPR’s 2021 Longuet-Higgins Prize recognizes the pose paper.

Timeline

  1. 2002–2006

    An on-demand property system

    In 2002, he files a Microsoft patent for an on-demand property system that tracks dependencies among object properties; the patent is granted in 2006.

  2. September 2008

    Starting Kinect body tracking

    In September 2008, he emails Microsoft Research’s Jamie Shotton to ask for help with a planned game accessory that can track bodies in real time. He is a principal software engineer with Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business.

  3. 2011

    Recognizing pose from depth

    At CVPR in June 2011, he coauthors a method that predicts 3D body-joint positions from one depth image by classifying pixels into body parts. The system runs at 200 frames per second on consumer hardware.

  4. 2011

    A CVPR Best Paper Award

    The human-pose paper wins CVPR’s Best Paper Award during the 2011 conference.

  5. 2011

    Parallelizing Kinect training

    In December 2011, he coauthors a paper on parallelizing the decision-forest training used for Kinect’s body-parts classification system.

  6. 2016

    Partitioning training data

    A 2016 patent names him as a co-inventor of a method that uses a global classifier to partition training data into class-specific subsets, then trains a second classifier on those subsets.

  7. 2021

    The Longuet-Higgins Prize

    CVPR’s 2021 Longuet-Higgins Prize recognizes the 2011 human-pose paper he coauthors.

  1. Among employers with 30+ full-time cases, OpenAI leads primary technical role H-1B pay at $310,000, and Amazon, Google and Microsoft file 57% of all casesIncludes Microsoft. Across 440,669 certified US H-1B filings from 44 employers (FY2020–FY2026), OpenAI leads primary technical role base pay at $310,000 and xAI leads overall base pay at $290,000.
  2. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Microsoft. 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. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Microsoft. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. Google has the highest combined h-index among AI organizationsIncludes Microsoft. 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.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. US6986123B2 - Extensible on-demand property system patents.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Kinect Body Tracking Reaps Renown microsoft.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from a Single Depth Image microsoft.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Parallelizing the Training of the Kinect Body Parts Labeling Algorithm microsoft.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. US20160132786A1 - Partitioning data for training machine-learning classifiers patents.google.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. PAMITC AWARDS | CVPR 2021 cvpr2021.thecvf.com. Checked 21 October 2026.