Michael Black
Also known as Michael J. Black
Michael Black studies computer vision and the reconstruction of people from images. His career includes joint research on statistical models of human shape. Black earned a Yale doctorate in 1992, following degrees at British Columbia and Stanford. He later worked at Toronto and Xerox PARC. Black served on Brown’s computer science faculty from 2000 to 2010 and became a professor in 2004. Black co-founded Body Labs in 2013. Amazon acquired Body Labs in 2017. He is also a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
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Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.
Timeline
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1992
Doctoral training
Black earned a Yale doctorate in 1992, following degrees at British Columbia and Stanford. He later worked at Toronto and Xerox PARC.
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2000–2010
Faculty work at Brown
Black served on Brown’s computer science faculty from 2000 to 2010 and became a professor in 2004.
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2013–2017
Body Labs
Black co-founded Body Labs in 2013. Amazon acquired Body Labs in 2017. He is also a founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
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2016
Estimating human pose and shape
Black coauthored Keep it SMPL with five other researchers. The method estimates a three-dimensional body mesh from one image by fitting a statistical body model to detected joints.
Sources and credits
Photo: www.mpg.de; Michael Black profile photograph; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: mpg.de. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.