Edwin Joseph Selker, better known as Ted Selker, is an American computer scientist known for his user interface inventions.

Biography

Selker graduated from Brown University in 1979 with a BS in Applied Mathematics, and from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with an MS in Computer and Information Sciences in 1981. From June 1981 to 1983 he worked as research assistant in the Stanford University, Robotics Laboratory. One of his projects was a collaborative display system for the WAITS system of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).

He worked for Atari for a year, then returned to Stanford to teach for a year.

Selker joined IBM in August 1985, first at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He graduated with a PhD from City University of New York in 1992. His thesis was titled "A Framework for Proactive Interactive Adaptive Computer Help".

He then moved to the IBM Almaden Research Center where he founded and directed the User Systems Ergonomics Research lab.

He was made an IBM Fellow in 1996. Selker holds 67 US patents. which are the distinctive feature of the ThinkPad line of laptop computers (designed, developed and sold by IBM but produced by Lenovo since 2005).

Selker joined the MIT faculty in September 1999. He headed the Context Aware Computing group at the MIT Media Lab and was the MIT director of The Voting Technology Project and Design Intelligence.

He joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley In November 2008 to help create its PhD program and to head the Considerate Systems group. From June to August 2011 he was the Director of Research at start-up Scanadu. Scanadu aims to turn smart phones into medical monitoring devices.

He has taught at Stanford University, Hampshire College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Brown University and consulted at Xerox PARC. His work often takes the form of bleeding edge prototype concept products, for example hybrid search engines, and is supported by cognitive science research into human computer interaction.

He is married with two children.

References

  • Context Aware Computing group homepage
  • Ted Selker election research papers