Bio
A pioneer in the wearable computing frontier, Thad Starner has produced over 450 papers and presentations on his work and is a professor for the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Founder of the annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, Starner is also a technical lead for Google Glass and holds more than 80 United States patents that have been awarded or are in process. In 1990, Starner coined the term "augmented reality" to describe the types of interfaces he envisioned for the future, and he has been wearing a computer with a head-up display as part of his daily life since 1993 – perhaps the longest such experience known.
Besides Glass, Starner’s projects include a wireless glove that teaches how to play piano melodies without active attention by the wearer, a game for deaf children using sign language recognition that helps them acquire language skills, creating wearable computers to enable two-way communication experiments with wild dolphins, making wearable computers for working dogs to better communicate with their handlers, recovering phrase-level sign language from brain signals, and recognizing speech without vocalizing.
