Valerie Landau

Developer of a multi-touch interface for chorded text entry, Landau filed two patents with her colleague and mentor Douglas Engelbart. Their most recent patent (filed April 2010) describes a multitouch interface for chorded text entry. The new patent was inspired by Engelbart's early work developing the Chorded keyboard. They also released an application for the iPhone for chorded texting called "TipTapSpeech".

Landau has also served as co-founder of Program for the Future, a non-profit organization that promoted Engelbart's vision of Collective Intelligence. She is also author of the seminal book on online education "Developing an Effective Online Course" and earned the "Online Pioneer" award. She and Engelbart also collaborated on writing the book "The Engelbart Hypothesis: Dialogs with Douglas Engelbart" along with co-author Eileen Clegg.

She attended high school in Cuba, where students engaged in agricultural labor as well as academic study, and began her career working under the legendary Brazilian educator Paulo Freire while working on the literacy campaign in Nicaragua. Landau graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Education from the Department of Human Development and Psychology with an emphasis in Technology in Education in 1996.

She is also known for her work in multimedia at Round World Media and for her work mentoring students in a three-year project studying and applying the Engelbart Hypothesis, and she created an online archive of Engelbart-related events and videos. Landau has also worked as an instructional and interaction designer on many award-winning projects, educational games, and online courses. She co-founded Round World Media along with her brother, four-time Grammy nominated music producer Greg Landau. She subsequently served as Director of Assessment at Samuel Merritt University.