Ted Selker

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Dr. Ted Selker (Edwin Joseph Selker [1]), is an American computer scientist who as of 2005 heads the Context Aware Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab and is the MIT director of The Voting Technology Project and Design Intelligence. Selker holds 56 US patents, and is best known for developing the pointing stick (a.k.a TrackPoint) which forms the once distinctive feature of IBM Thinkpads.

Prior to joining MIT faculty in November 1999, Ted was an IBM fellow and directed the User Systems Ergonomics Research lab. He has taught at Stanford University, Hampshire College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Brown University. Also he has worked at Xerox PARC and Atari Research Labs. 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.

Selker is a graduate of Brown University, holds a Masters from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a PhD from City University, New York. He is regarded as a pioneer in the field of context awareness and is frequently cited in the media. Ted's new domestic technologies have been featured on Good Morning America, ABC, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, NPR, and the Discovery channel among others. He was co-recipient of computer science policy leader award for Scientific American 50 in 2004. He now lives in Arlington, Massachusetts and is married with two children.