Tinkering Tinkerer: Margaret Minsky

Dr. Margaret Minsky creates multimedia artifacts exploring learning, improvisation and thought. Her recent investigations concern embodied interaction with technology aimed at increasing cognitive, social, and physical wellbeing. She recently completed a residency at the ATLAS Center, an interdisciplinary laboratory at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Her core research has been in the field of haptic interfaces (computational interfaces that simulate objects that you can touch and feel), as well as in computer graphics and educational technology. She developed the first technique for creating haptic textures as part of her doctoral research at the MIT Media Lab. Her publication areas are in computer graphics, haptics, mechanical engineering, and educational computation, and she has served on conference program committees including ACM Siggraph. Dr. Minsky previously directed research at Atari Cambridge Laboratory and Interval Research Corporation, and her work has been presented internationally.