Michael Black
VP Digital Human Research at Epic Games
Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Black is a leading researcher and technology executive specializing in articulated 3D human motion, body shape estimation, neural avatars, and advanced motion capture, with seven years of recent industry experience and a career rooted in decades of academic research. As VP of Digital Human Research at Epic Games and Emeritus Director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, he bridges foundational machine learning-driven computer vision with product-focused applications across apparel, fitness, medicine, games, and VFX. He co-founded companies (Body Labs, Meshcapade) that translated academic models into commercial body-digitization platforms and has held visiting and professorial roles at top institutions including Brown, Stanford, ETH Zurich, and Tübingen. His early work produced enduring algorithms for optical flow and motion estimation (the Black and Anandan method), and he continues to push the state of the art in markerless capture and neural avatars. Based in Tübingen, Germany, he uniquely combines long-term leadership in basic science with hands-on productization of digital human technologies for real-world industries.
6 years of coding experience
31 years of employment as a software developer
B.Sc., Honours Computer Science, B.Sc., Honours Computer Science at The University of British ColumbiaPh.D., Computer Science, Ph.D., Computer Science at Yale UniversityM.S., Computer Science, M.S., Computer Science at Stanford University
English, German, French
Github Skills (33)
siggraph10
pose9
face9
smpl-model9
normals9
cloth-simulation9
graphics-3d9
depth9
3d-reconstruction8
avatar-generator8
3d-models8
human-pose-estimation8
animation7
image-processing7
pytorch7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
MichaelJBlack/human_body_prior
Jun 2019 - Sep 2021
VPoser: Variational Human Pose Prior
Contributions:1 push in 2 years 3 months
human-posedeep-learningcomputer-visionvariationalpose
MichaelJBlack/NeuralBodies.github.io
Apr 2021 - Sep 2021
Code for the website https://neuralbodies.github.io
Contributions:1 push in 4 months
neural-networkneural-networksmachine-learning
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