Michael J. Black is a distinguished computer scientist known for his contributions to computer vision, graphics, and machine learning. He holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and has held positions at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and Brown University. He's a founding director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and has won major awards in the field, including the Koenderink Prize, Helmholtz Prize, and Longuet-Higgins Prize. He's coauthored over 300 scientific publications, co-founded companies like Body Labs (acquired by Amazon), and has influenced areas like optical flow estimation, 3D shape models, and human motion analysis. His work bridges academia and industry, advancing fields like computer vision and computational neuroscience.