Oral History of Ted Selker

Interviewed by Gunter Steinbach on 2017-06-12 in Mountain View CA, X8232.2017
© Computer History Museum

Dr. Ted Selker's work centers on human-computer interactions.He has a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Brown U, an M.S. in Computer & Information Sciences from U Massachusetts at Amherst, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from City U of New York.

He worked for short times at Atari and Xerox PARC before joining IBM in 1985. At IBM, first at T.J. Watson Labs, then at Almaden research labs, he rose to Fellow, inventing the TrackPoint cursor control device, making major contributions to the ThinkPad notebook computer, designing artificial-intelligence help and teaching systems, designing wearable computing devices, researching eye tracking systems, and designing an intelligent "living room of the future".

In 1999 Dr. Selker left IBM to become an Associate Professor at MIT's Media Lab. Here he built a group working on context-aware computing, demonstrated a "kitchen of the future", was part of the "One Laptop per Child" design effort, lead industrial design projects for many corporate
partners, and investigated voting technology and security.

Since leaving MIT in 2008 Dr. Selker has set up the Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon U Silicon Valley and has consulted and invented for many different companies, including Amazon and Google.

Lot number: X8232.2017
Catalog number: 102740177

[mitch]

Interesting. Everyone has a story to tell... :)

[joseongah]

Thank you ted we have learned a lot :D