Desney Tan

Desney Tan, Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, manages the Computational User Experiences group in Redmond, Washington as well as the Human-Computer Interaction group in Beijing, China. Tan applies signal processing and machine learning to recognize noisy signals, specifically those in or on the human body, in an attempt to empower humans with technology that is much easier to interact with. Tan received a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1996, after which he spent a couple of years building bridges and “blowing things up” in the Singapore Armed Forces. In 2004, he earned his PhD in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked with Randy Pausch. In 2007, Tan was honored as one of the MIT Technology Review’s “Young Innovators Under 35” for his work on brain-computer interfaces.