Thad Starner
Professor
Georgia Institute of Technology
Director of the Contextual Computing Group
Thad Starner is a wearable computing pioneer and a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also a Technical Lead on Google’s Glass, a self-contained wearable computer.
Thad received a PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory, where he founded the MIT Wearable Computing Project. Starner was perhaps the first to integrate a wearable computer into his everyday life as a personal assistant, and he coined the term “augmented reality” in 1990 to describe the types of interfaces he envisioned at the time. His groups’ prototypes on mobile context-based search, gesture-based interfaces, mobile MP3 players, and mobile instant messaging foreshadowed now commonplace devices and services.
Thad has authored over 150 peer-reviewed scientific publications with over 100 co-authors on mobile Human Computer Interaction (HCI), machine learning, energy harvesting for mobile devices, and gesture recognition. He is listed as an inventor on over 80 United States patents awarded or in process. Thad is a founder of the annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, and his work has been discussed in many forums including CNN, NPR, the BBC, CBS’s 60 Minutes, ABC’s 48 Hours, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.