Professor Andrew Blake

Andrew Blake, FREng FRS is a pioneer in the development of the theory and algorithms that make it possible for computers to behave as seeing machines.

His interests are primarily in automating the analysis of images and tracking the movement of objects in 3D scenes. His career has been divided between academia – as junior faculty in Edinburgh in the 1980s, and later in Oxford as Professor of Engineering Science and Fellow of Exeter College. At the turn of the millenium he moved to Cambridge to join Microsoft’s newly established European research lab. He became Lab Director (2010-15) winning, with his team, the Silver and the Gold medals of the Royal Academy of Engineering for research and technology for 3D machine vision. He was inaugural Director of the Alan Turing Institute (2015-18) and established Samsung’s European AI lab in Cambridge (2018-22). He is a consultant in Artificial Intelligence, and has advised major European companies, a variety of startups. He mentors numerous budding scientists and engineers. He received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Sheffield and Edinburgh in 2013, and was elected an Honorary Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford in 2024.