Professor of Computer Science; Chair, Media Arts and Technology; and Co-Director, Four Eyes Laboratory, UC Santa Barbara
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Matthew Turk is Professor of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara, and the Chair of UCSB’s Media Arts and Technology Program, an interdisciplinary graduate program positioned at the convergence of arts, media, and technology. He received a B.S. from Virginia Tech in 1982, an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1984, and a Ph.D. from MIT in 1991. He worked on robot planning and vision for autonomous robot navigation (part of DARPA’s ALV program) in the mid 1980s. A paper on his dissertation research on automatic face recognition received an IEEE Computer Society Outstanding Paper award at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 1991; another paper from his thesis work received a “Most Influential Paper of the Decade Award” from the IAPR MVA2000 workshop. His current research concerns computer vision, human-computer interaction, and perceptual interfaces. He is co-director of the UCSB Four Eyes Lab, which focuses on research in “imaging, interaction, and innovative interfaces.” Professor Turk also serves on the Faculty Steering Committee for the Center for Information Technology and Society and the Cognitive Science Program. He is also a member of the UC Transliteracies Project and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Image and Vision Computing. He is the chair of the ICMI Advisory Board. He has been involved in organizing many conference, most recently as general chair of ACM Multimedia 2006.

 Links:      Home page | UCSB Four Eyes Lab

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Traditional computer interfaces have very limited input capabilities, typically restricted to keyboard typing and mouse manipulations (pointing, selecting, dragging, etc.). The area of vision-based interaction seeks to provide a wider and more expressive range of input capabilities by using computer vision techniques to process sensor data from one or more cameras in real-time, in order to reliably estimate relevant visual information about the user – i.e., to use vision as a passive, non-intrusive, non-contact input modality for human-computer interaction.