Seth Jared Teller was born on May 28, 1964, and passed away on July 1, 2014. He was an American computer scientist and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work focused on areas such as computer vision, sensor networks, and robotics. In the late 1990s, Teller led the Argus and Rover projects, where he used mobile cameras and location information to create three-dimensional models of cities.
Early life
Teller's parents were Joan Teller and Samuel H. Teller from Bolton, Connecticut. Samuel Teller was a senior judge in the Connecticut Superior Court in Rockville.
Teller earned his bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1992. His doctoral thesis, titled "Visibility Computations in Densely Occluded Polyhedral Environments," was guided by Carlo H. Séquin.
Academic career
He worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Computer Science Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Princeton University's Computer Science Department.
Teller received a Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 1997.
Teller led the Robotics, Vision, and Sensor Networks group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He studied robotics and artificial intelligence to create robots that can understand their environment. His work included designing robots and tools to help people with disabilities. Some of his projects were a wheelchair controlled by voice commands, a wearable device that helps visually impaired people learn about their surroundings, a self-driving car, and an unmanned forklift. He also created technology to help first responders avoid being hit by vehicles while working on highway accidents.
Teller was part of the MIT team that developed software for a robot named "Atlas" for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Earlier, Teller's robotic car took part in the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge competition.
In 2015, the Robotics Science and Systems Foundation created a Best Systems Paper Award to honor Teller.
Personal life and death
Seth Teller married Rachel Zimmerman, a journalist from New York, in September 2002. The couple had two daughters.
Teller participated in community activities in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and helped start the Neighborhood Association of East Cambridge.
Seth Teller died by suicide on July 1, 2014, at the age of 50, by jumping off the Tobin Bridge. In 2024, Zimmerman published a book about the effects of her husband’s death, titled Us, After: A Memoir of Love and Suicide.