Steve Mann, PhD (MIT '97), P.Eng. (Ontario), FIEEE

Breaking news: Steve Mann and his students just got back from CES / ICCE in Las Vegas where Mann and his students received 3 awards including Mann's receiving the 2025 IEEE Consumer Electronics Award, joining the ranks of Apple founder Steve Wozniak (2021 Award recipient), Linux creator Linus Torvalds (2018), and the inventor of the cellphone, Marty Cooper (2015).
Mann also received the Lifeboat Foundation Guardian Award of 2024
https://lifeboat.com/ex/guardian.award for his contributions to sousveillance, so now he also joins the ranks of Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton (2023 Award recipient), as well as others like Jeff Bezos (2018 recipient), Julian Assange (2016), Bill Gates (2015), Elon Musk (2014), Edward Snowden (2013), Stephen Hawking (2008), Ray Kurzeil (2005), and Warren Buffet (2002).

Full Professor, University of Toronto, Ontario, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Visiting Full Professor, Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering, Room 216, 350 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305.
Winner of the 2025 IEEE Consumer Electronics Award.
Chair of the Silicon Valley Innovation & Entrepreneurship Forum (SVIEF).
Founding Member of the IEEE Council on Extended Intelligence.
Founder of the Water-Human-Computer Interface initiative: the new field of WaterHCI and member of SwimOP.com (See "Why We Swim").
Marquis Who's Who 2018 Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.

Invented wearable computing in his childhood, brought this invention to MIT to found the MIT wearable computing project, and "persisted in his vision and ended up founding a new discipline." -- Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab Director, 1997 (link).

Invented, designed, and built the world's first smartglasses (smart eyeglass) for computer vision.

Inventor of the world's first contact lens display, and the first implantable eye camera.

Invented, designed, and built the world's first smartwatch in 1998 (patent filed 1999, featured on cover of Linux Journal July 2000) which he presented at IEEE ISSCC 2000 where he was named "The father of the wearable computer".

Inventor of HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging, used in more than 2 billion smartphones. ("The first report of digitally combining multiple pictures of the same scene to improve dynamic range appears to be Mann 1993" -- Robertson etal, JEI 12(2).)

Inventor of the hydraulophone, world's first water-based musical instrument. It is also a new kind of physiotherapy device, as well as a new way of sensing water quality by sensing sound propagation in water.

Inventor of the the first digitally addressable strip of lights: SWIM (Sequential Wave Imprinting Machine) was the world's first eXtended Reality (X-Reality or XR) system. SWIM is an array of lights that can be waved back-and-forth to imprint images, text, graphics, and graphs onto human vision or photographic media. Many regard this as the predecessor of the metaverse, and the world's first spatial computer.

Founded companies with valuation in excess of $1 billion, together with students. (See http://wearcam.org/news/)

Mentorship examples:

Maya Burhanpurkar, Age 15, mentored at Mann's lab, won the Canada-Wide 2014 Science Fair, with scientific experiment based on Mann's concept of absement (link). Recipient of the international Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee medal. She is now at Harvard University, studying Engineering Physics and Computer Science.
Mann's MaSc students James Fung (now with Google) and Chris Aimone, together with Mann, and others, co-founded InteraXon and raised $28,800,000. InteraXon's Muse product, now sold in Best Buy stores all across North America and on Amazon.com, is known as "The King of Wearables" (BetaKit), the #1 in wearables (PC Retail) and "the holy grail for mindfulness", ("Muse 2 review: The world's best meditation tech just got even better").

Caption: Muse2 Launch day at InteraXon, 2018 October 30th.
See also Time-frequency analysis of visual evoked potentials using chirplet transform, Cui, Wong, and Mann, Electronics Letters 41(4), p217-218.
While he was Mann's PhD student and TA, Ryan Janzen founded a transportation company (Transpod), raised $65,000,000 ($20,000,000 investment + 32,000,000 Euro grant), and also won the "Innovation of the Year Award", and subsequently raised another $500 million.
While he was Mann's PhD student and TA, Raymond Lo (now at Harvard) founded Meta, raised $75,000,000, and created the world's first extramissive spatial imaging augmented reality glass, the Meta1, based on the metavision/metaveillance and wearable computing technology that Mann invented during childhood [IEEE Computer 30(2), p25-32, February 1997; USPTO 61/748,468, 61/916,773, and 20140184496] using video feedback to sense sensors and visualize their capacity to see, leading to US Patent 9,720,505 and Application 61/748,468, filed Jan 3, 2013, by Meta.
Meta logo by abakography (Toposculpting)
Caption: Raymond Lo and Steve Mann with Meta-2 eyeglass.

Caption: Metavision for visualizing vision sensors, and seeing their capacity to see.

Caption: One of Steve Mann's childhood inventions, Metavision or Metaveillance (the vision of vision, sensing sensors, and sensing their capacity to sense) with the Sequential Wave Imprinting Machine (SWIM). In this early photograph, Mann has captured a camera's capacity to "see", i.e. a visualization of vision. More generally his ability to sense sensors and sensing their capacity to sense allowed him to create many other inventions in the area of vision, sensing, and sensors.

Metavision (also known as Metaveillance) for sensing sensors, and sensing their capacity to sense. In this photograph we we see the sensory interference pattern between two Shure SM58 microphones.