Matthew Turk

Biography:

Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAT and Computer Science, specialties: computer vision, human-computer interaction, multimodal/perceptual interfaces, gesture recognition.

Matthew Turk is interested in expanding the ways in which people interact with computers. "Graphical user interfaces are very useful and quite appropriate for some uses of computers, but the computing landscape is changing: we are moving beyond the days when computers are primarily boxes that sit on a desk, used for spreadsheets and word processing. Computers are becoming more ubiquitous, appearing in a proliferation of shapes and sizes. They are being embedded into the world around us, and we are carrying (soon wearing) them wherever we go. We need new ways of conveying and accessing information, without requiring undue effort or attention on our part. We need to make computers accessible to all people in all situations. My particular expertise in this area is vision-based interfaces, using computer vision as an input modality: tracking, recognizing, and modeling people and their activity. New interface technologies become new tools for musical and artistic expression. MAT provides a great opportunity to explore this domain."