Steve Mann, Ph.D., is known in the radio amateur circles as N1NLF (in the United States), or VA3NLF (in Canada). He also teaches at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Experience: Dr. Steve Mann is regarded by many as the inventor of the wearable computer (computing being distinct from special purpose devices like ordinary wristwatches and eyeglasses, etc.), and of the EyeTap video camera and reality mediator. He is currently a faculty member at University of Toronto, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Dr. Mann has been inventing, designing, and building wearable computers for more than 20 years, dating back to his high school days in the 1970s. He brought his inventions and ideas to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991, initiating, what was to later become the MIT Wearable Computing Project. He also built the world's first covert fully functional WearComp with display and camera concealed in ordinary eyeglasses in 1995, for the creation of his award winning documentary ShootingBack. He is also the inventor of the wristwatch videophone, of the chirplet transform (a new mathematical framework for signal processing), and of the comparametric image processor.

Mann proposed the first IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computing (ISWC97), and was also Publications Chair of that conference. He also chaired the first Special Issue on Wearable Computing to appear in an academic journal (Personal Technologies Journal), and has been the keynote speaker at numerious scientific and industry symposia and conferences. He has also been an invited speaker at numerous university Distinguished Lecture Series and colloquia. His work has been featured in leading international fora for the general public, such as The New York Times, LA-Times, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, WiReD, NBC, ABC, CNN, David Letterman Top Ten, CBC-TV, Scientific American, Scientific American Frontiers, Discovery Channel, Byte, Reuters, New Scientist, Rolling Stone, and BBC. He is also on the Advisory Board of Xybernaut Corporation.

Education: Steve received undergraduate degrees in physics (B.Sc.) and electrical engineering (B.Eng.) from McMaster University, as well as a masters degree (M.Eng.) under the supervision of Dr. Simon Haykin, director and founder of the McMaster University Communications Research Laboratory (CRL). He received his Ph.D. degree from Masachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1997, in which the topic of his doctoral dissertation was the new field of Personal Imaging he had initiated.