Diana Colella is executive vice president of Autodesk’s Entertainment & Media vertical solutions group. In this role, she manages product, strategy and execution for the company’s portfolio servicing the film, TV and games industries. Colella has been with Autodesk for more than 20 years occupying a range of leadership roles, including head of product management and worldwide support. She has extensive experience in strategically transforming business models, creating new product offerings and optimizing processes on a global scale. Most recently, she served as vice president in Autodesk’s Business Strategy and Marketing group, leading the M&E and AutoCAD businesses, which represent more than $1B in annual recurring revenue. In this role, she drove the company’s strategy for digital conversion of non-compliant users and launched One AutoCAD. She is the executive sponsor of the Autodesk Women’s Network.

Bran Ferren, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer, APPLIED MINDS: One of Fast Company’s “100 Most Creative People in Business,” Bran Ferren is a master of the arts & sciences. Equal parts artist + designer & scientist + engineer, he is an expert on leveraging curiosity and creativity to inspire innovation. His 2014 TED Talk entitled “To Create for the Ages, Let’s Combine Art and Engineering” has been translated into 27 languages and viewed over a million times. Bran is co-founder and chief creative officer of Applied Minds LLC, a company that for 20 years has provided advanced technology, creative design, and consulting services to both commercial and government clients. At AppliedMinds, past and present clients include Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Cubic Corporation, Boeing, The Aerospace Corp, RTX, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, John Deere, ESRI, Scientific Games, Sony, Herman Miller, Intel Corporation, L-3 Communications, Genworth Financial, UCLA, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress. Prior to Applied Minds, Bran held various leadership positions, including president of Research & Development for the Walt Disney Company. At Disney, he advised CEO’s Michael Eisner, Frank Wells and senior leadership on emerging technology and business opportunities and led the development of key innovations for divisions such as ABC Television. At Disney’s Imagineering division, where he was president of Creative Technology, he was responsible for advanced technology research and development for the theme parks and played key roles in creating major park attractions such as Test Track by General Motors, and Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Prior to that, Bran was president of Associates & Ferren, a company acquired by Disney. Bran is a prolific inventor, named on over 570 domestic and foreign patent applications and 269 issued US patents. He developed numerous successful technologies, designs, experiences, and innovations used in  consumer products, theme parks, imaging, broadcast television, theater, film production, arena concerts, buildings, aerospace, command centers, exhibits, and motor vehicles. He has led many special purpose vehicle (and containerized) design and fabrication programs, for both government and commercial customers. These have been used for applications as diverse as film & video production, oilfield geological exploration, remote fabrication, and even transporting the Bill of Rights while on a 50-state national tour. His recent vehicle project, the KiraVan, has been featured in Wired Magazine, international publications and hundreds of websites. His recent design for the Genworth R70i Aging Experience has also been receiving major international media coverage, and also appears extensively on the web. Bran is also an Oscar nominee and Academy Award winner for Science and Technical Achievement, whose work has appeared in films such as Altered States and Little Shop of Horrors. Major theater credits include award winning special effects, lighting, and sound design for Broadway shows including Evita, Cats, and the Lion King. For his work in theater, he has received two New York Drama Desk Awards, the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle award, the Maharam Foundation Award, and the American Theater Wing, Hewes Design Awards. He has pioneered technologies and staging concepts for music legends including Emerson, Lake & Palmer, R.E.M., Depeche Mode, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, and Paul McCartney. He is the creative force behind the the new John Drew Theater at Guild Hall and the Smithsonian Institute’s digital strategy to ‘reach a billion people.’ His body of work has been recognized by the Wally Russell Lifetime Achievement Award in Lighting Design, the Kilby International Award for significant contributions to society, the US Intelligence Community Seal Medallion, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Inland California Chapter, Honor Award, and the Sir Arthur Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society. Bran has been a senior advisory board member or consultant for science, advanced technology, and innovation to over two dozen U.S. government and military agencies and the U.S. Senate. A popular public speaker, he has delivered over 250 keynote speeches worldwide.

Michael Zyda is an Emeritus Professor of Engineering Practice at the University of Southern California. He was the Founding Director of USC's Games Program. Zyda founded that program and the year-long advanced game projects course that forms the core of USC Games 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 eleven of the last twelve years. His alums have shipped games played by over 5 billion players, about $250B in revenue and $2.5B in payroll to those alums. Zyda is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, an IEEE Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award winner, a Senior Member of the National Academy of Inventors, a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA) and a National Associate of the National Academies. Zyda is a member of the Editorial Board & Games Column Editor, IEEE Computer magazine. Zyda is a Distinguished Collaborator for the Stanford Human Perception Laboratory affiliated with the Institute for Human-Centered AI. 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. At NPS, Zyda’s NPSNET Research Group built the first networked virtual environment with fully instrumented body suits that played across the Internet. His work on the networking of virtual environments contributed to the development of the IEEE 1278.1 standard for distributed interactive simulation. He helped found the subspecialty in modeling and simulation for the United States Navy, the simulation operations functional area (57) for the US Army and the simulation operations area (MOS-9625) for the US Marine Corps. While at NPS, Zyda was Associate Editor and then Senior Editor for the MIT Press Journal Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments from 1993 - 2004. With Fred Brooks, Henry Fuchs and Mary Whitton, he co-founded the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics in 1990.  On the 19th of October 2024, Zyda was awarded Life Fellow in the IEEE In Recognition of the Many Years of Loyal Membership & Support of the Activities of IEEE. On the 26th of January 2024, Zyda was elected as a Fellow of the Industry Academy of the International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance. On the 13th of March 2022, Zyda became an Inaugural Member of the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy. On the 6th of June 2021, Zyda was made a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA). On the 13th of January 2021, he was promoted to ACM Fellow “for contributions to game design, game and virtual reality networking, and body tracking.” On the 11th of February 2020, the National Academy of Inventors elected Zyda as a Senior Member for “success in patents, licensing, and commercialization” and for producing “technologies that have brought, or aspire to bring, real impact on the welfare of society”. In May 2017, Zyda was appointed a member of the National Academy of Inventorsin recognition of advanced technological development and innovation as issued by the United States Patent & Trademark Office. In August 2019, Zyda was appointed Distinguished Collaborator for the Stanford Human Perception Laboratoryaffiliated with the Institute for Human-Centered AI. In November 2018, he was promoted to IEEE Fellow with the citation “for contributions to game design and networking.” In March 2017, Zyda was awarded the IEEE Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award "for fundamental work in virtual reality networking, body tracking & institutionalizing the application of virtual reality.”  Zyda 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 nine-axis sensor in the Nintendo Wii U.  Professor Zyda has consulted for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, NASA AMES, the Ministry of Industrial Development Sabah Province, Malaysia, Japan Tech Services Corporation, Tokyo, and Paramount Digital Entertainment, among others. He is a speaker with Celebrity Speakers, International. He is the founder and Chairman of Happynin Games, and 411 Productions DTLA. He is co-founder, with Qingyun Ma, of Great Wall Tiger, Xi’an, China. He is consultant to the Ministry of Culture & Shaanxi Cultural Group, Xi’an, China – entertainment technology advisor for AR & VR & theme park projects in/around the historic sites of Shaanxi Province, including the Terracotta Warriors Museum, the e-Pang Palace and the Zhaojin Red Army Base, 2015 – present.