Professor Woodrow (Woody) Barfield

Woodrow (Woody) Barfield, Ph.D., J.D., LLM is a speaker, lecturer, and author who served as Professor of Engineering at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, where he received the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award.

Woody directed the Sensory Engineering Laboratory at the University of Washington where he was a Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His research revolved around the design and use of wearable computers and augmented and virtual reality systems. He served as Senior Editor of Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments and recently published Musings on Presence Twenty-Five Years after “Being There” about his work at Presence.

He is currently Associate Editor of the Virtual Reality Journal and is the Senior Editor of the first and second editions of Fundamentals of Wearable Computers and Augmented Reality. His book Cyber-Humans: Our Future with Machines talks about how robots will surpass human intelligence within the next fifty years. He edited The Cambridge Handbook of the Law of Algorithms and coauthored Advanced Introduction to Law and Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Environments and Advanced Interface Design, and Human Factors in Intelligent Transportation System.

Woody earned his Ph.D. in Engineering from Purdue University and his J.D. degree and LLM in intellectual property law and policy, serving as an editor of the Journal of Law, Technology & Arts. He has authored over 350 publications and major presentations, including keynote addresses and articles in engineering and law review journals. He currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Watch Judge Curtis Karnow and Woodrow Barfield discuss the paper The Application of Traditional Tort Theory to Machine Learning. Watch Woody’s interview Far beyond the screen, the augmented man? Read his profile at ResearchGate and his dblp computer science bibliography, where you can find his publications and projects. Follow him on Facebook.