Ted Selker

Edwin Joseph "Ted" Selker (born September 4, 1956 ) is an American computer scientist. He is the inventor of the Trackpoint .

Selker studied mathematics at Brown University with a bachelor's degree in 1979 and computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a master's degree in 1981. He then worked for Atari and in the robotics laboratory at Stanford University until 1983 , where he already worked on computer user interfaces taught at Stanford for a year. In 1985 he joined IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center . In 1992 he received his doctorate from the City University of New York ( A framework for proactive interactive adaptive computer help ). From 1992 he was at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San José , where he founded and headed the User Systems Ergonomics Research Laboratory until 1995. In 1996 he became an IBM Fellow .

From 1993 to 1999 he was also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Stanford University.

In 1999 he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he was an Associate Professor and headed the Context Aware Computing Group at MIT's MIT Media Lab . He was also the co-director of a joint MIT and Caltech project on voting technology from 2004 to 2008. In 2008 he left MIT.

He developed the Trackpoint technology, which is used, for example, in the ThinkPad series of notebooks .

In 2011 he was research director of the startup Scanadu, which wants to use smartphones for medical purposes. He has lived in Palo Alto since 2008 . He is an Associate Director of the CyLab Mobility Research Center of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley.

He was also a consultant at Xerox PARC .

He holds 56 patents (2008).

Web links

• Homepage at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley
• Website at MIT with CV