7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
(Open to all Digital Hollywood Registrants)
The University Project - Evening Session
"Research, Development and Investment in Entertainment Technologies and Media Studies Innovation: From the University to Industry Application"
Charles S. Swartz, Executive Director & CEO, USC Entertainment Technology Center
Dr. Richard Weinberg, Research Professor, USC School of Cinema-Television
Glenda Revelle, Ph.D., Research Scientist, Strategic Research Initiatives, Education & Research, Sesame Workshop
Dana Plautz, Chair Art and Entertainment Research Council Committee, Intel Research
Athomas Goldberg, Game Technologies Group Leader, Sun Microsystems
Celia Pearce, Arts Research Manager & Associate Director of the Game Culture & Technology Lab, Cal UC Irvine Division
Mark Bolas, Visiting Associate Professor, Interactive Media Department, School of Cinema and Television, USC & Chairman, Fakespace Labs, Inc.
Newton Lee, Senior Producer, Disney Online, and Editor-in-Chief, ACM Computers in Entertainment, Moderator
Charles S. Swartz, Executive Director/CEO, Entertainment Technolog
y Center at USC: Charles S. Swartz is the executive director and CEO of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC (ETC-USC), where he oversees efforts to understand the impact of new technology on the entertainment industry. He draws from more than two decades of experience in feature film and television production, academic programming and strategic consulting to lead the Center in identifying emerging entertainment technology issues and developing projects to study them. Swartz began his in film and television production at Warner Bros. Television, Roger Corman’s New World Pictures and Dimension Pictures, which Swartz co-founded. Swartz produced eight feature films and earned a screen credit for writing six of them. After Dimension, Swartz became education specialist and program manager at UCLA Extension’s Department of Entertainment Studies and Performing Arts. There, he created a trendsetting curriculum that reflected the rise of digital technology and business in entertainment and that set new standards for film and television education. Following UCLA, Swartz was named director of business development for the entertainment industry at Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) and then director of integrated strategy for media and entertainment at e-business consulting firm Sapient. When Sapient closed its media sector, Swartz founded Charles S. Swartz Consulting to connect entertainment clients with companies exploring the potential of broadband wireless. Swartz assumed his current position at ETC-USC in 2003, refocusing and recharging the research center. He is governor representing SMPTE’s Hollywood region and co-chair of the Hollywood section education committee. SMPTE named Swartz Fellow in 2004.Dana Plautz, Chair Art and Entertainment Research Council Committe
e, Intel Research: After 10 years in the entertainment industry (holding senior posts at Norman Lear's Embassy Communications and Hanna-Barbera Productions), Plautz joined Intel's multimedia lab in 1993. Currently, she chairs the Art and Entertainment Committee for the Intel Research Council and is also the manager of the Research Communications team for Intel Research. Plautz is a founding board member of Eyebeam, a non-profit organization that engages cultural dialogue at the intersection of the arts and sciences, she is a member of the Beall Centers Curatorial Review Committee and the Banff Centre New Media Advisory Board. She held a government appointment as Chairman for the Oregon Film and Video Office from 1998-2004, served on the California College Arts and Craft (CCAC) Design + Media Advisory Board, and Portland State Universities Creative Studies Initiative. Plautz also produced the award-winning documentary Artist Response to 9.11, discussing artist's role in our society. Plautz lectures frequently on the subject of new media around the country and has funded research in this area for the past 9 years with leading Universities around the world.Glenda Revelle, PhD, is a Research Scientist at Sesame Workshop in New York. In that capacity, she is responsible for investigating and pursuing strategic research opportunities in the area of interactive media for children based on Sesame Street and other Sesame Workshop properties. She also holds a research faculty appointment in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Dr. Revelle received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan. Prior to her current role, Dr. Revelle was a Senior Resarcher at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab in the University of Maryland’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. As VP for Interactive Product Development at Sesame Workshop from 1983 to 1999, Dr. Revelle managed the development of over 60 commercially published products, with business partners including IBM, Microsoft, AT&T, Prodigy, Videotron interactive cable, Mattel Media, Viewmaster-Ideal Toys and many others. In addition, Dr. Revelle has served as an interactive education consultant to many prominent media companies, including Scholastic Publishing, Discovery Channel, Fisher-Price Toys and others. Dr. Revelle has published extensively and continues to conduct research related to developing and evaluating developmentally appropriate interactive experiences for children and investigating the educational potential of new and emerging technologies.
Celia Pearce is Arts Research Manager and Associate Director of th
e Game Culture & Technology Lab and for the UC Irvine division of Cal-(IT)2 (California Institute for Telecommunication and Information Technology), University of California Irvine. She has spent the past twenty-plus years as game designer, artist, researcher, teacher and author. Her publications include The Interactive Book: A Guide to the Interactive Revolution (Macmillan), as well as numerous other articles on interactive media, game design and culture. She is a member of the Interactive Game Developer’s Association (IGDA) a founding board member of the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), and a regular contributor to Game Studies Journal.Athomas Goldberg is the Program Manager for Game Technologies at
Sun Microsystems, Inc. and is responsible for coordinating Sun's Game Technologies Group in driving technology and business strategy within the games industry. Prior to joining Sun, Athomas ran an animation and games middleware company called Improv Technologies and was responsible for the development of Orchestrate3D, winner of a Computer Graphics World Year 2000 Innovation Award. Before forming Improv Technologies, Athomas was the lead researcher on the New York University Media Research Lab's Improv Project, developing new technologies for synthetic actors. This research has been presented at numerous conferences and symposia and is featured in several books on animation and game technologies. Athomas lives in Oakland with his wife and two daughters.Mark Bolas is Visiting Associate Professor in the Interactive Media Department at the School of Cinema and Television at USC, and is the Chairman of Fakespace Labs, Inc. His most recent academic research has been with the Product Design program and MediaX at Stanford University. This research includes a socially aware doll based on Sesame Street`s Elmo character, devices for fluent interaction with computer aided design models, and a system for the distillation of context from audio based life-logs. His work in industry has included the founding of Fakespace Systems, Inc., a leading integrator of advanced virtual reality systems. He also founded iMNetworks, Inc., which licenses user interface designs for streaming media technologies to a number of leading consumer electronic companies. Mark’s work in the arts is focused on creating virtual environments and transducers that fully engage one’s perceptions, creating a visceral memory of the experience. His three-part thesis, Design Of, For, and With Virtual Environments strove to come to terms with virtual reality as a medium for creation and exploration, and he has exhibited a number of pieces that integrate music with spatially synchronized synthetic worlds. Mark holds numerous patents and co-chairs the annual SPIE conference, The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality.
Richard Weinberg, Ph.D., Research Professor at the USC School of Cinema-Television and Annenberg Center. o Founding Director of the USC Computer Animation Laboratory. o Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota; B.S. in Computer Science and Psychology from Cornell University. Founded the Computer Graphics Group at Cray Research; developed computer graphics for Control Data, NASA, Lockheed, Digital Productions before joining USC. o Visiting Professor at Tokyo University of Technology.
Newton Lee is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Association for
Computing Machinery (ACM) Computers in Entertainment magazine, a senior producer at Disney Online, an adjunct faculty member at Woodbury University, and a former Bell Labs researcher. Lee founded the Disney Online Technology Forums and has developed over 100 games and activities since 1996 for award-winning web sites Disney.com and Disney's Blast, as well as enhanced-TV programs for ABC's "Summer Jam Concert" and Disney Channel's "In Concert." A pioneer on CD-ROM development, Lee created one of the first object-oriented scripting languages and cross-platform multimedia compilers for interactive CD-ROMs. He co-developed 11 CD-ROM titles including the award-winning bestsellers "The Lion King Animated Storybook" and "Lamp Chop Loves Music." He and his colleagues received the 1995 Michigan's Leading Edge Technologies Award. Lee has served as a juror for the 2003 Emmy Awards for Advanced Media Technology. He has won two community development awards from the California Junior Chamber of Commerce, and four Disney VoluntEARS project leader awards. He has published two novels, a book chapter in "Machine Learning and Uncertain Reasoning" (Academic Press 1990), and dozens of research papers on software applications in medical science, national security, quality control, telecommunication, library science, and new media. Lee holds a B.S. and M.S. in computer science from Virginia Tech, an electrical engineering degree and honorary doctorate from Vincennes University. His graduate thesis won an ACM award and led to the creation of the first commercial A.I. product from AT&T Bell Labs. He currently serves on the Strategic Advisory Council at the Virginia Tech Computer Science Department, the Multimedia/Web Design Advisory Board of the Art Institute of California, the IMSC Board of Councilors at USC, the WINMEC Media, Entertainment, Sport, and Games Advisory Board at UCLA, and the Beijing Multimedia Industry Association Advisory Board.