Matthew Turk

Matthew Turk is the President of the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), an independent graduate research institute that focuses on fundamental computer science, artificial intelligence, and related areas. Prior to joining TTIC in 2019, Turk was CS department chair at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he continues as Professor Emeritus. His research interests include computer vision, multimodal interaction, augmented and virtual reality, and ethical and legal aspects of computing. He received a BS from Virginia Tech, an MS from Carnegie Mellon University, and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He has received several best paper awards and has been general or program chair of several major conferences, including CVPR, WACV, ICMI, Face and Gesture, and ACM Multimedia. In the 1990s, Turk helped to found the Vision Technology Group at Microsoft Research, and he brings additional industry experience gained in working with a small Silicon Valley company and a large aerospace company. In 2014, he co-founded a startup company that spun out from NSF-funded research in his lab and was acquired in 2016. He is a Fellow of the ACM, the IEEE, and the IAPR and a recipient of the Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies.