Bio & Contact
Clifton Forlines builds interactive systems that start from the realities of sensing, latency, and physical interaction. His work focuses on how raw signals from touch surfaces, wearables, and embedded sensors can be transformed into reliable, expressive input for real people using real systems.
Across academia and industry, he has designed new sensing architectures, interaction techniques, and evaluation methods for multi-user, low-latency, and safety-critical contexts. His work is grounded in user-centered research, including contextual inquiry, task analysis, and iterative user testing, ensuring that system requirements reflect how people actually work under real constraints and that the results are both useful and usable.
In more recent projects, he applies machine learning and AI techniques to interpret complex sensor data, enabling systems that infer user intent, posture, cognitive state, or context from noisy, real-world signals. He places particular emphasis on experiment design, data quality, and empirical evaluation, combining controlled studies with in-situ validation.
He is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto where he works to identify the research needs of industry partners and connect them with members of the university research faculty. Previously, Clifton worked as an Associate Research Professor at Northeastern University’s Roux Institute, served as Founder and CTO of Tactual Labs, led the Human-Centered Engineering Group at Draper Laboratory, and worked as a Research Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL).
Clifton can best be reached at: cforlines (at) gmail (dot) com