Michael L. Best is Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) and Professor with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology where he directs the Technologies and International Development Lab. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has served as director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the eDevelopment group at the MIT Media Lab.
 

Research Fields:
* Information and Communications Technologies for Development
* International Diffusion and Innovation in IT

Geographic Focuses:
* Africa (Sub-Saharan)
* Asia (East)
* Asia (South)
* Latin America and Caribbean

Issues:
* Inequality and Social Justice
* International Development
* Digital and Mixed Media
* Digital Communication
* Human/Machine Interaction
* Internet Studies

While teaching textiles and fashion design studio classes at Savannah College of Art & Design, Zeagler realized his true passion lies in bridging the gap between the disciplines of Wearable design and Human-Centered Computing. A diverse background in fashion, industrial design, and textiles drive his research on electronic textiles and on-body interfaces with the Contextual Computing Group of the GVU center of Georgia Tech. As a Principal Research Scientist for the Georgia Tech Interactive Media Technology Center and Instructor for the Georgia Tech School of Industrial Design he teaches courses on Wearable Product Design and an ID section of Mobile and Ubiquitous Computing (MUC).  Zeagler enjoys working with corporations such as HP/Palm and Google to bring real-world experience into the classroom. He recently acquired a NASA Georgia Space Consortium grant to fund MUC student projects on wearable computing for space—a wonderful opportunity for undergraduate students. He is also a member of the NASA Wearable Technology Cluster a group of scientists and academics working together to give advice to those in NASA working on wearable computing or electronic textile projects. A deep understanding of the garment production process fosters innovation in his research. Zeagler’s company Pecan Pie Couture hand-dyed, embroidered, and screen-printed textiles and garments. Building upon that skillset, his recent research led to the creation of the Electronic Textile Interface Swatch Book (ESwatchBook) in collaboration with Thad Starner. The ESwatchBook is designed to help facilitate discussions between the skill and craft-based design disciplines (.i.e. fashion) and more technical disciplines (.i.e. computer science). To put the ESwatchBook’s capabilities to the test, he developed a series of workshops at multiple colleges with the purpose of bringing together designers with engineers/technology specialists. The workshops were funded by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, which he co-authored. Zeagler’s most recent endeavor FIDO: Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations is an exploration into using wearable electronics to enhance interactions between service dogs and their handler/owners.

Peter Presti is a principal research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. During his 22 years with the university he has collaborated with companies such as IBM, Humana, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, Bellsouth, Denon Nippon-Columbia, and others. Government research sponsors have included DARPA, NIH, NSF, DoE, USDA, and the VA. His areas of research include sensor systems and biometrics, wearable computers, signal processing, pattern recognition, embedded systems, electronics design, data visualization and computer graphics, and computational geometry. His background spanning both custom hardware and software development provides him the skills to design and build fully integrated prototype systems, and in past projects has designed and built high-speed data capture systems, a variety of kinetic sensors, biometric sensors, and wearable computer systems.

Jeremy Johnson is a research scientist with IPaT where he has been working since 1999. Jeremy’s interests include ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, human-computer interaction, computer audio, sound design and creative applications of computing to the arts. At IMTC he contributes his skill as a software engineer to guide software development projects through the full software life cycle, from requirements gathering to deployment.

Thad Starner is a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Interactive Computing. Thad was perhaps the first to integrate a wearable computer into his everyday life as an intelligent personal assistant. Starner's work as a Ph.D. student would help found the field of Wearable Computing. His group's prototypes and patents on mobile MP3 players, mobile instant messaging and e-mail, gesture-based interfaces, and mobile context-based search foreshadowed now commonplace devices and services. Thad has authored over 100 scientific publications with over 100 co-authors on mobile Human Computer Interaction (HCI), pattern discovery, human power generation for mobile devices, and gesture recognition, and he is a founder and current co-chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems. His work is discussed in public forums such as CNN, NPR, the BBC, CBS's 60 Minutes, The New York Times, Nikkei Science, The London Independent, The Bangkok Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Mark Riedl is a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab. Mark's research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence, virtual worlds, and storytelling. The principle research question Mark addresses through his research is: how can intelligent computational systems reason about and autonomously create engaging experiences for users of virtual worlds and computer games. Mark's primary research contributions are in the area of artificial intelligence approaches to automated story generation and interactive storytelling for entertainment, education, and training. Narrative is a cognitive tool used by humans for communication and sense-making. The goal of my narrative intelligence research is to discover new computational algorithms and models that can facilitate the development of intelligent computer systems that can reason about narrative in order to be better communicators, entertainers, and educators. Additionally, Mark has explored the following research topics: virtual cinematography in 3D virtual worlds; player modeling; procedural generation of computer game content; computational creativity; human creativity support; intelligent virtual characters; mixed-initiative problem solving; and discourse generation. Mark earned a Ph.D. degree in 2004 from North Carolina State University. From 2004-2007, Mark was a Research Scientist at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies where he researched and developed interactive, narrative-based training systems. Mark joined the Georgia Tech College of Computing in 2007 where he continues to study artificial intelligence approaches to story generation, interactive narratives, and adaptive computer games. His research is supported by the NSF, DARPA, the U.S. Army, Google, and Disney. Mark was the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award and an NSF CAREER Award.

Professor Hays's research interests span computer vision, graphics, robotics, and machine learning. Before joining Georgia Tech, he was the Manning assistant professor of computer science at Brown University. James was a post-doc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. James received his B.S. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2003.