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. Afterwards it was until 1983 in the robot laboratory at Stanford University, where he was already working on user interfaces for computers, worked for Atari and taught a year at Stanford. In 1985 he went to IBM to the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. He was at the City University of New York PhD (A framework for proactive adaptive interactive computer help) 1992. From 1992 he was in San Jose, where he remained until 1995, the User Systems Ergonomics Research Laboratory, founded and directed at the Almaden Research Center of IBM. He was IBM Fellow in 1996.

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 the Context Aware Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab headed. He was also from 2004 to 2008 Co-director of a joint project of MIT and Caltech on technologies for Electoral Process ( Voting Technology Project). In 2008 he left the 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 startups Scanadu that wants to use smart phones for medical purposes. Since 2008 he lives in Palo Alto. He is 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).