Talk Abstract: This talk will describe current progress on building a 3D Human Foundation Agent (HFA) that can perceive the world and the humans in it. The HFA is a digitally embodied agent that understands human behavior and responds to it using its “motor system” to translate its goals into 3D actions. The Human Foundation Agent must (1) perceive human movement in 3D, (2) understand the goals, implications, and emotions inherent in that movement, and (3) plan and generate natural motor activity to (4) drive a digital or physical embodiment that interacts with real or virtual humans in real or virtual 3D worlds. This talk will focus on current progress and the path to building HFAs through 3D human motion capture from video, synthetic training data, generative behavior modeling, AI-driven graphics, and large vision-language models that are fine-tuned to understand 3D humans. HFAs will radically change how people interact with machines. So much so that a child born today will have trouble imagining a world in which technology doesn’t understand their motions and behaviors.

Speaker Biography: Michael Black received his B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia (1985), his M.S. from Stanford (1989), and his Ph.D. from Yale University (1992). He has held positions at the University of Toronto, Xerox PARC, and Brown University. He is an Honorary professor at the University of Tübingen and one of the founding directors at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany, where he leads the Perceiving Systems department and serves as Managing Director. He was a Distinguished Amazon Scholar (2017-2021). He is a recipient of the PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award, the 2022 and 2010 Koenderink Prize, the 2013 Helmholtz Prize, and the 2020 Longuet-Higgins Prize. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Black is an active entrepreneur: in 2013 he co-founded Body Labs Inc., which was acquired by Amazon in 2017, and he is a co-founder and Chief Scientist of Meshcapade. He also serves as the Speaker of Cyber Valley, Europe’s largest AI ecosystem.