Desney Tan is General Manager of the Microsoft Clinical Sensing and Analytics group, responsible for Microsoft’s clinical productivity tools, medical devices, and genomics (or more generally -omics) agendas. He also holds an affiliate faculty appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research interests include Human-Computer Interaction, Mobile Computing, as well as Healthcare, and he has shipped his work in various versions of Windows and Office, the Microsoft Handwriting Recognition Engine and Tablet Input Panel, Xbox Kinect, and most recently the Microsoft Band.
Desney was honored as one of MIT Technology Review’s 2007 Young Innovators Under 35 for his work on brain-computer interfaces and a 2012 Kavli Fellow by the US National Academy of Sciences. He was named one of Sci-Fi Channel’s Young Visionaries at TED 2009, as well as Forbes’ Revolutionaries: Radical Thinkers and their World-Changing Ideas for his work on Whole Body Computing. He was Technical Program Chair for CHI 2008 as well as General Chair for CHI 2011, and serves as Editor-in-Chief for Foundations and Trends in HCI as well as the Springer HCI Series.