Prof. Thad Starner

Thad Starner is a wearable computing pioneer, having worn a computer with a head-up display in his daily life since 1993. Dr. Starner is a Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech and a Technical Lead on Google Glass. Besides Glass, Thad's projects include a wireless glove that teaches how to play piano melodies without active attention by the wearer; a glove that helps stroke patients recover tone, sensation, and dexterity in their hands; a game for deaf children using computer vision-based sign language recognition that helps them acquire language skills; underwater wearable computers for two-way communication experiments with wild dolphins; wearable computers for working dogs to facilitate communication with their handlers; brain computer interfaces that recover phrase-level sign language from the motor cortex; and systems for recognizing English speech without vocalization. Dr. Starner is a founder of the annual ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers, now in its 22nd year. Thad has produced over 500 papers and presentations with over 300 co-authors and has over 80 issued United States utility patents. He was elected to the CHI Academy in 2017 and was a finalist for the Lemelson-MIT Prize for inventorship and the White House's Champions of Change for his work on Deaf education.