Selker graduated from Brown University in 1979 with a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics, and from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with an Mississippi in Computer and Information Sciences in 1981. He graduated with a Doctor of Philosophy from City University of New York in 1992.
From June 1981 to 1983 he worked as research assistant in the Stanford University, Robotics Laboratory. One of his projects was a collaborative display system for the WAITS system of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). He worked for Atari for a year, then returned to Stanford to teach for a year.
Selker joined International Business Machines Corporation in August 1985, first at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
His thesis was titled "A Framework for Proactive Interactive Adaptive Computer Help". He then moved to the International Business Machines Corporation Almaden Research Center where he founded and directed the User Systems Ergonomics Research laboratory
He was made an International Business Machines Corporation Fellow in 1996. Selker holds 67 United States patents.
He developed the pointing stick (known as TrackPoint) technology which are the distinctive feature of the ThinkPad line of laptop computers (designed, developed and sold by International Business Machines Corporation but produced by Lenovo since 2005).
Selker joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty in September 1999. He headed the Context Aware Computing group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory and was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology director of The Voting Technology Project and Design Intelligence. He joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley In November 2008 to help create its Doctor of Philosophy program and to head the Considerate Systems group.
From June to August 2011 he was the Director of Research at start-up Scanadu.
Scanadu aims to turn smart phones into medical monitoring devices. He has taught at Stanford University, Hampshire College, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Brown University and consulted at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. His work often takes the form of bleeding edge prototype concept products, for example hybrid search engines, and is supported by cognitive science research into human computer interaction.
He is regarded as a pioneer in the field of context awareness and has been cited in the media. Selker"s technologies have been featured on Good Morning America, American Broadcasting Company, the Wall Street Journal, the British Broadcasting Corporation, National Public Radio, and the Discovery channel among others
He advocates a crowd model of innovation that he calls Excubation.
