Dean’s Lecture Series

Date: Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Time: 12:30-1:45pm

Location: GOL-Auditorium

Speaker Bio

Dr. Ted Selker is CTO of Alphyco creating a community based considerate social media for advancing women.  Dr. Selker is an entrepreneur inventor who also mentors innovation. Dr. Selker's academic positions  at RIT and University of Maryland currently focus  usable security and  voting technology. He spent 5 years at at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley as director Research on Accessible voting,  Considerate Systems research and in developing the campus’s research mission. Prior to that, Dr. Selker spent 10 years as an associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory where he created the Context Aware Computing group, co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting T echnology Project, and directed the Industrial Design Intelligence future for product design project. Prior to that, his successes at targeted product creation and enhancement at IBM earned him the role of IBM Fellow.

Dr. Selker's work has birthed successful products ranging from notebook computers to operating systems. It has accumulated numerous awards, patents, and papers and has often been featured in the press. He was co-recipient of the Computer Science Policy Leader Award for Scientific American 50, the American Association for People with Disabilities Thomas Paine Award for his work on voting technology and the Telluride Tech fest award.

Abstract/Presentation info:

Voting and Usable Security

Opportunities for usable security improving the world are everywhere.  Without being able to expose voters and their selections voting is an especially interesting application for security research. Historically, most votes are lost in registration, voting ballot design problems and polling place operations causing long lines, and possibly mail-in ballot fraud. This talk will describe voting  process problems and describe technological solutions for voting improvement. Voting disenfranchisement is much higher for people with perceptual, physical and cognitive disabilities.  More than 14% of registered voters are in danger of increased errors due to dyslexia. More than 6.5% of due to short term memory problems.  We will describe and demonstrate technologies we are making that help disabled people and  improve voting universally as well.