The Directory of Research and Researchers at Brown: Michael Black

Michael Black's research addresses estimation and understanding of human movement. His group has been developing computational and mathematical models of movement that can be recovered from video sequences using new computer vision algorithms. At the core of this work are probabilistic models of the visual world that are learned from natural scenes. Furthermore, his group exploits these models of human movement in the design of neural motor prosetheses. In particular they model the relationship between neural firing activity of populations of motor cortical neurons and complex natural movement. The goal is to enable paralyzed patients to control dexterous robot hands using neural signals recorded with an implanted electrode array.

Overview | Research | Grants/Awards | Teaching | Publications

Michael Black received his B.Sc. from the University of British
Columbia (1985), his M.S. from Stanford (1989), and his Ph.D. in
Computer Science from Yale University in 1992. He has been a visiting
researcher at the NASA Ames Research Center and an Assistant Professor
in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. In
1993 Prof. Black joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where he
managed the Image Understanding area and later founded the Digital
Video Analysis group. In 2000, Prof. Black joined the faculty of
Brown University where he is a Professor of Computer Science. At
CVPR'91 he received the IEEE Computer Society Outstanding Paper Award
for his work with P. Anandan on robust optical flow estimation. His
work also received Honorable Mention for the Marr Prize in 1999 (with
David Fleet) and 2005 (with Stefan Roth). Prof. Black's research
interests in machine vision include optical flow estimation, human
motion analysis and probabilistic models of the visual world. In
computational neuroscience his work focuses on probabilistic models of
the neural code, the neural control of movement and the development
of neural prostheses that directly connect brains and machines to
restore lost function to the physically disabled.

Download Michael Black's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format

MICHAEL BLACK
Professor
Computer Science
Phone: +1 401 867 4798

Michael Black's Brown Research URL:
http://research.brown.edu/myresearch/Michael_Black

On The Web:
Michael J. Black

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Research at Brown: The Directory of Research and Researchers at Brown: Research Profile