Professor Steve Mann

Steve Mann, Ph.D. has written 139 research publications (39 journal articles, 37 conference articles, 2 books, 10 book chapters, and 51 patents), and has been the keynote speaker at 24 scientific and industry symposia and conferences and has also been an invited speaker at 52 university Distinguished Lecture Series and colloquia.
 
He is also a hydraulist, as well as the inventor of the hydraulophone, a musical instrument that is similar to a woodwind instrument but uses pressurized water instead of air. He is also a sculptor who builds hydraulophones as public art installations.
 
Steve is the inventor of WearComp (wearable computer) and WearCam (eyetap camera and reality mediator). He coined the term sousveillance. He is currently a faculty member at University of Toronto, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
 
He has been working on his WearComp invention for more than 20 years, dating back to his high school days in the 1970s. He brought his inventions and ideas to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991, and is considered to have brought the seed that later become the MIT Wearable Computing Project. He also built the world’s first covert fully functional WearComp with display and camera concealed in ordinary eyeglasses in 1995, for the creation of his award winning documentary ShootingBack. He earned his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 1997 for work including the introduction of Humanistic Intelligence. He is also inventor of the Chirplet Transform, a new mathematical framework for signal processing, and of Comparametric Equations, a new mathematical framework for computer mediated reality.
 
Steve was the one who both proposed, to the IEEE Computer Society, and was Publications Chair, of the first IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC97).
 
He also chaired the first Special Issue on Wearable Computing to appear in a scholarly journal (Personal Technologies), and continues to chair Special Issues on Wearable Computing in other scholarly journals. He has also given numerous Keynote Addresses on the subject, including the Keynote at the first International Conference on Wearable Computing, the Keynote at the Virtual Reality conference, and the Keynote at the McLuhan Conference on Culture and Technology, on the subject of Privacy issues and Wearable Computers.
 
Steve wrote the lead article for Proc. IEEE Vol. 86, No. 11, Intelligent Signal Processing, Nov. 1998.
 
His textbook entitled Intelligent Image Processing by John Wiley and Sons, as well as a popular book about his life as a “cyborg”, by Random House, Doubleday, further document his “mediated reality” concepts.
 
His patents include Method and apparatus for producing digital images having extended dynamic ranges, Method and apparatus for relating and combining multiple images of the same scene or object(s), and Wearable camera system with viewfinder means.
 
Watch Wearable Computing Fashion Show at TED City Conference.