Thad Starner
Image courtesy Sam Ogden
Ph.D. candidate in Media Arts and Sciences
- Research interests
-
Wearable Computing , augmented reality, machine and human
vision, psychophysics, computer graphics,
American Sign Language (ASL) recognition , and handwriting recognition
- Advisor: Sandy Pentland
- Education
-
S.M., Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Feb. 1995
S.B., Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991
S.B., Brain and Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1991
- Experience
-
Associate Scientist
Bolt, Beranek, and Newman
Research Description
This is 3 years old and is being updated
In the past, humans and computers have been limited to one locale of
operation: the desk. What happens when the computer can not only be
physically close to the user all the time (as with notebooks and
handwriting based PDA's) but also in constant use (i.e. while shaking
hands in a conference, walking down the street, etc.)? With a display
in a pair of eyeglasses, a one-handed keyboard/mouse, a CPU box with
local memory and hard disk, and a digital cellular modem connection, I
have set upon a personal experiment, now in its fifth year, to find
out. So far, I have discovered that not only is the system invaluable
in storing and organizing information, but it also opens several new
(or very old, depending on your perspective) fields of research:
augmented memory, augmented reality, and intellectual collectives.
For more information, see the Wearable Computing web page at
http://wearables.www.media.mit.edu/projects/wearables
Other research projects include ALIVE and recognizing sign language
through computer vision. ALIVE is a wire-free, non-intrusive, full
body virtual environment which uses only machine vision for sensing
the user. The vision architecture (IVE) has been used to interact
with autonomous virtual creatures, play games, control window systems,
and operate telerobots. Currently, the vision system is being adapted
and combined with a hidden Markov model system to recognize American
Sign Language.
Selected Publications
- Augmented Reality Through
Wearable Computing
- T. Starner, S. Mann, B. Rhodes, J. Levine, J. Healey, D. Kirsch,
R. Picard, and A. Pentland
Presence 6(4), 1997
TR #355 is the document as submitted to Presence Oct. 1995.
- The Locust Swarm: An
Environmentally-powered, Networkless Location and Messaging System
- T. Starner, D. Kirsh, S. Assefa
IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing,
Oct. 1997.
- A Wearable Computing Based American Sign Language Recognizer
- T. Starner, J. Weaver, A. Pentland
IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing,
Oct. 1997.
- Human Powered Wearable
Computing
- T. Starner
IBM Systems Journal, 35(3-4), 1996
- Stochasticks: Augmenting the billiards experience with
probabilistic vision and wearable computers
- T. Jebara, Cyrus Eyster, J. Weaver, T. Starner, and A. Pentland
IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing,
Oct. 1997.
- Visual Recognition of American Sign Language Using Hidden Markov Models.
- T. Starner and A. Pentland
International Workshop on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (IWAFGR) 1995
Zurich, Switzerland
VISMOD TR 306.
Uses Entropic's HTK program.
- Visual Recognition of American Sign Language Using Hidden Markov Models.
- T. Starner
Master's Thesis, MIT, Feb 1995.
VISMOD TR 316.
- On-line Cursive Handwriting Recognition Using Speech Methods
- T. Starner, J. Makhoul, R. Schwartz, G. Chou
IEEE Conf. on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing,
Adelaide, Australia, April 1994, Vol. V, pp. 125-128.
VISMOD TR 282.
- View-Based and Modular Eigenspaces for Face Recognition
- A. Pentland, B. Moghaddam, T. Starner
Proceedings of CVPR '94,
June 21-23, 1994, Seattle, WA,
Braun-Brumfield, Inc.
- Device Synchronization Using an Optimal Linear Filter
- M. Friedmann, T. Starner, A. Pentland
Virtual Reality Systems,
Earnshaw, Gigante, Jones (eds.),
Academic Press, 1993
- Visually Controlled Graphics
- A. Azarbayejani, T. Starner, B. Horowitz, A. Pentland
IEEE PAMI Special Issue on Image Analysis and Synthesis,
November 1991
- The Thingworld Modeling System
- A. Pentland, I. Essa, M. Friedman, B. Horowitz, S. Sclaroff, T. Starner
Algorithms and Parallel VLSI Architectures Volume B: Proceedings
E.F. Deprettere and A. J. van der Veen (eds.)
Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., 1991
- Interests
- Computer games, algorithms, cryptography, skeet shooting, and table tennis
- Birthplace
- York, PA
- A favorite book
- Across Realtime by Vernor Vinge
- Most wishes to have dinner with
- My girlfriend
Personal Web Page 
Vismod Home Page