3^rd International Conference on Computer Graphics & Animation November 07-09, 2016 Las Vegas, USA

Biography:

Michael Zyda is the Founding Director of the USC GamePipe Laboratory, and a Professor of Engineering Practice in the USC Department of Computer Science. At USC, he founded the BS in Computer Science (Games), the MS in Computer Science (Game Development) and the USC Games joint Advanced Games course and took that program from no program to the #1 Games program in the world. That program has been rated #1 by the Princeton Review for six straight years. His alums have shipped games played by over 2.5B players, about $100B in revenue. From Fall 2000 to Fall 2004, he was the Founding Director of the MOVES (modeling, virtual environments and simulation) Institute located at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at NPS as well. Professor Zyda's research interests include computer graphics, large-scale, networked 3D virtual environments and games, agent-based simulation, modeling human and organizational behavior, interactive computer-generated story, computer-generated characters, video production, entertainment/defense collaboration, modeling and simulation, and serious and entertainment games. He is a pioneer in the following fields - computer graphics, networked virtual environments, modeling and simulation, and serious and entertainment games. He holds a lifetime appointment as a National Associate of the National Academies, an appointment made by the Council of the National Academy of Sciences in November 2003, awarded in recognition of “extraordinary service” to the National Academies. He is a member of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. He served as the principal investigator and development director of the America’s Army PC game funded by the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs. He took America’s Army from conception to three million plus registered players and hence, transformed Army recruiting. The creation of the America’s Army game founded the serious games field. He co-holds two patents that form the basis for the 9-axis sensor in the Nintendo Wii U. He is known at the Indiana Jones of virtual reality and the Raymond Chandler of technical computer science.

Abstract:

We are at the primitive stage for virtual reality where we can see and move through and interact with either 50,000 triangles per frame on a mobile device or 2M triangles per frame on a device tethered with a very thick cable that lives in danger of pulling your $2,000 desktop off the desktop. While all of this is exciting, we have greater things that will come out into this field and give us experiences just barely even thought of.  We will see lighter headsets, augmented reality systems that project directly into our eye, tracking that becomes non-intrusive and less finicky, speech recognition that becomes first rate and AI characters we can talk to and interact with, characters imbued with emotions that react to our sensed emotions. The biggest issue is how do we author story in all of this and make it as competitive for our emotional engagement as film and the best of non-VR games. We talk about these issues and why VR is going to be bigger, badder & not just 1990’s graphics on a mobile phone stuck on our face.

Biography:

Anton Nijholt received his PhD in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. He held positions at various universities, both inside and outside the Netherlands. In 1989 he was appointed full professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. His main research interests are human-computer interaction with a focus on playful interfaces, entertainment computing, and humor generation. He edited various books, most recently on playful interfaces, social collective intelligence, and brain-computer interaction. A new book on 'Playable Cities' will appear in 2016. Together with many of the more than fifty PhD students he supervised, he wrote numerous journal and conference papers on these topics.

Nijholt acted as program chair and general chair of many large international conferences, including ACE (Advances in Computer Entertainment), ICMI (International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces), ICEC (International Conference on Computer Entertainment), ACII (Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction), CASA (Computer Animation and Social Agents), INTETAIN (Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment), FG (Faces & Gestures), and IVA (Intelligent Virtual Agents). Recent (2015-2016) keynote talks at various conferences have been on humor engineering in smart environments, playable cities and on the future of brain-computer interfaces for  non-clinical applications.

Nijholt is chief editor of the specialty section Human-Media Interaction of the journals Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers in Digital Humanities, and Frontiers in ICT. He is co-editor of the Springer Book Series Gaming Media and Social Effects. Since 2015 he is also Global Research fellow at the Imagineering Institute, Iskandar, Malaysia, where he continues his investigations in playfulness and humor in interfaces and smart environments.

Abstract:

In this talk we draw attention to the emerging field of smart material interfaces. These novel composites, that in some cases are already celebrated as the answer for the 21st century’s technological needs, are generally referred to as materials that are capable of sensing the environment and actively responding to environmental changes by changing their physical properties. That is, smart materials have physical properties that can be changed or controlled by external stimuli such as electric or magnetic fields, light, temperature or stress. Shape, size and color are among the properties that can be changed. Smart material interfaces are physical interfaces that utilize these materials to sense the environment and display responses by changing their physical properties. Some common smart materials appear in the form of polymers, ceramics, memory metals or hydro-gels. This talk aims at stimulating research and development in interfaces that make novel use of such smart materials. Smart material interfaces can be applied in different domains and used for different purposes: functional, communicative and creative. We will also discuss our own experiences with smart material interfaces. We will show examples of creative artifacts designed by students of the Fine Arts Academy in Venice and by primary school children using thermo-chromic and conductive ink for the design of ‘electronic’ Origami.

Biography:

Newton Lee is CEO of Newton Lee Laboratories LLC, president of the Institute for Education, Research, and Scholarships, adjunct professor at Woodbury University’s School of Media, Culture & Design, and editor-in-chief of ACM Computers in Entertainment. Previously, he was a computer scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories, senior producer and engineer at The Walt Disney Company, and research staff member at the Institute for Defense Analyses. He was founder of Disney Online Technology Forum, creator of Bell Labs’ first-ever commercial AI tool, and inventor of the world’s first annotated multimedia OPAC for the U.S. National Agricultural Library. Lee graduated Summa Cum Laude from Virginia Tech with a B.S. and M.S. degree in Computer Science, and he earned a perfect GPA from Vincennes University with an A.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and an honorary doctorate in Computer Science. He is the co-author of Disney Stories: Getting to Digital; author of the Total Information Awareness book series including Facebook Nation and Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity; coauthor/editor of the Digital Da Vinci book series including Computers in Music and Computers in the Arts and Sciences; and editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games.

Abstract:

Albert Einstein once said, “True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.” In accordance with the theme of the conference – “Where Art meets Science…. Imagine the Possibilities! ” – Newton Lee’s keynote speech takes us on an unforgettable journey from the world's first computer art to Cyborg artists to Star Trek's Holodeck. Along the way, he also discusses virtual reality with Oculus Rift, Microsoft HoloLens, and Magic Leap, among others.

In a 1996 interview by Terry Gross, Steve Jobs remarked that “computer science is a liberal art; it’s something everyone should know how to use, at least, and harness in their life. It’s not something that should be relegated to 5 percent of the population over in the corner. It’s something that everybody should be exposed to and everyone should have mastery of to some extent, and that’s how we viewed computation and these computation devices.”

Regina Dugan, senior executive at Google and former director of DARPA, summed it up nicely: “Science is art. It is the process of creating something that never exists before. ... It makes us ask new questions about ourselves, others; about ethics, the future.”