Joshua Smith

Josh Smith, PhD is the Milton and Delia Zeutschel Professor in Entrepreneurial Excellence at the University of Washington, where he leads the Sensor Systems Lab, jointly appointed in the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, and the department of Electrical Engineering.

Josh received his PhD with Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Media Lab, where he did groundbreaking work in electrical field sensing that has yielded real-life applications in areas such as automotive passenger sensing in smart airbag systems. His work on electric field sensing has also influenced the multi-touch capacitive sensing products that have been incorporated in smart phones since the iPhone. Josh began his career as Chief Scientist at Escher Group, a startup born at MIT. Prior to joining the UW faculty, he worked as a Principal Engineer at Intel. At the University of Washington, Josh’s Sensor Systems Lab has spun out two other venture-backed companies: Jeeva Wireless and Wibotic. With Proprio, Josh is exploring a new angle on research themes that he has long engaged with, including novel camera systems, human pose tracking, image processing, and interpretation of complex sensor data—all of which apply to the challenges of estimating anatomical geometry from a light field array of images, for the greatest accuracy and real-time 3D visualization during surgery.