SETH TELLER ’85

SETH TELLER, a member of MIT’s computer science and engineering faculty, who was internationally renowned for his efforts to develop robots that are useful to people in their daily lives, died July 1, 2014. He was 50. After graduating from Wesleyan he received his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and did research at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Princeton University before joining the faculty at MIT, where he rose to the rank of full professor. He led a research group that focused on making machines aware of their surroundings and capable of interacting naturally with people in healthcare, military, civilian, and disaster-relief settings. As leader of MIT’s Fifth Sense Project, he worked with colleagues and students to develop wearable devices to assist people who are blind or have low vision. A neighborhood activist and longtime ultimate Frisbee player, he led grassroots efforts to promote neighborhood-friendly development decisions and to improve open spaces in Cambridge, Mass. Among those who survive are his wife, Rachel Zimmerman, two daughters, his parents, two brothers, and a large extended family.