Michael J. Jones

Timeline

1. 1997

   A doctorate in vision

   At MIT, he completed a Ph.D. in 1997. His main interests include computer vision, machine learning and data mining.

2. 2001

   A cascade for faces

   With Paul Viola, he published Rapid Object Detection using a Boosted Cascade of Simple Features at CVPR 2001. The method used AdaBoost to select image features for face detection.

3. 2003–2004

   Combining motion and appearance

   In 2003, the ICCV paper Jones coauthored with Paul Viola and Daniel Snow combined image intensity and motion to detect pedestrians. The ICCV Marr Prize was among his 2004 honors.

4. 2011

   A test of time

   In 2011, CVPR awarded the Longuet-Higgins Prize to Paul Viola and Jones for their 2001 boosted-cascade paper.

5. 2020

   Measuring video anomalies

   With Bharathkumar Ramachandra, he introduced the Street Scene dataset and two new evaluation criteria for video anomaly detection.

6. June 2023

   Explaining unusual activity

   EVAL builds location-specific models of normal activity and gives human-understandable reasons for anomaly decisions. With Ashish Singh and Erik Learned-Miller, he developed the system.

7. As of October 2026

   A fellowship in vision

   As of October 2026, he is a Distinguished Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, where his work focuses on computer vision and machine learning. IEEE elevated him to Fellow in 2026 for contributions to object detection and video-based anomaly detection.