Dr. Gordon Kurtenbach is the head of Autodesk Research (www.autodeskresearch.com), the industrial research group for Autodesk. His group is one of the rare industrial research groups in Canada which has thrived while still being part of a hi-tech Silicon Valley based company. Recently, his group has become a key tenant at the MaRS innovation hub in Toronto. Dr. Kurtenbach oversees a large range of research related to how we use software to design, make, and operate the built and created world. This includes research on human-computer interaction (HCI), machine intelligence, Internet of Things, environment and ergonomics, computational computing, and CAD for life-sciences. Dr. Kurtenbach has over twenty years of experience in doing research and bridging the gap between research and commercialization.

Dr. Kurtenbach has published numerous research papers and holds over fifty patents in the field of HCI. His work on gesture based interfaces, specifically “marking menus” has been highly influential in HCI research and practice. In 2011, Dr. Kurtenbach shared the NSERC Synergy Award for Innovation for collaboration between U. of Toronto and Autodesk Research. In 2005, he received the User Interface Software and Technology Lasting Impact Award for his early work on issues combining gestures and manipulation.

Prior to Autodesk, Dr. Kurtenbach was the head the interactive graphics research group at Alias which researched advanced technologies for various products such as Maya, AliasStudio, SketchBook and PortfolioWall. Prior to Alias, Dr. Kurtenbach was a researcher at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center working on pen based user interfaces for wall-sized display systems. Before Xerox, Dr. Kurtenbach was a member of Apple Computer's Advanced Technology Group researching gesture-based input techniques for graphical user interfaces. Dr. Kurtenbach received a B.Sc. from University of Saskatchewan in 1984, a M.Sc. from University of Toronto in 1988, and a Ph.D. from University of Toronto in 1993 in Computer Science.