Thad Starner is an Assistant Professor in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, where he founded and directs the Contextual Computing Group. Thad holds four degrees from MIT, including his PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory in 1999. Starner was an Associate Scientist with BBN’s Speech Systems Group in 1993 when he created one of the earliest high-accuracy on-line cursive handwriting recognition systems. Starner is one of the pioneers of wearable computing and has authored over 50 peer-reviewed scientific publications and book chapters in mobile computing, computer vision, augmented environments, and pattern recognition. Starner co-founded the IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) and is one of the founding members of the IEEE Technical Committee on the subject. He is also a founder of the MIT Wearable Computing Project and Charmed Technology. His work includes a gloveless, real-time sign language recognizer; various intelligent agents in support of everyday memory; theoretical frameworks for power generation and heat dissipation for wearables; several augmented realities; and a computer-vision based interactive workbench for which he received a “best paper” award at VR2000. Thad’s current work researches the use of computational agents for everyday-use wearable computers.

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