Dr. Thad Starner 

Professor of Computing 
Georgia Institute of Technology 

Thad Starner is a Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech and a senior staff research scientist at Google Deepmind. In 1990, Starner coined the term "augmented reality" to describe the types of interfaces he envisioned for the future. He is a founder of the annual ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) in 1997. From 2010-2018 Dr. Starner was a Technical Lead on Google's Glass, which was named a "50 Most Influential Gadget of All Time" by Time Magazine. Professor Starner was named an ACM Fellow in 2024 for foundational work in establishing, defining, and leading the wearable computing research community. He has also been inducted into the CHI Academy and Augmented World Expo's XR Hall of Fame. He has over 100 issued United States utility patents and 500 publications on wearables, artificial intelligence, and interfaces. 

Thad's current projects include AI smartglasses that learn from the wearer's activities, computer vision-based sign language recognition; a glove that helps stroke survivors recover tone, sensation, and dexterity in their hands; two-way communication experiments with wild dolphins; wearable computers for working dogs; and brain computer interfaces that allow typing by sensing the motor cortex.