Journal of Game Development

Jessica Bayliss is an assistant professor of Computer Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She received a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from California State University, Fresno in 1995, an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester in 1996, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Rochester in 2001. Her dissertation work on using a brain-computer interface for control in a virtual apartment attracted international recognition. Currently, Jessica is the founder of the RAPT (Reality and Programming Together) program for teaching introductory programming using games as an application area and is an active faculty member in RIT's Game Design and Development MS degree program. Her research interests center around the uses of AI in computer games.

Staffan Björk holds an M.Sc in Computer Science and a Ph.D. in Informatics from Göteborg University, Sweden. He has been the studio manager of the PLAY studio at the Interactive Institute in Sweden between 2001 and 2003 and currently works part time as a senior researcher at PLAY. He is also responsible for a master-level specialization in interactive simulations and games at the Chalmers technical university in Sweden, and is conducting research on pervasive games and social adaptability within a 3 1/2 year EU-funded project. He is the President of the Swedish human-computer interaction interest group, member of the executive board of the Digital Games Research Association (DIGRA), and author of many articles about game research and co-author of Patterns in Game Design .

Stephen Crane has a bachelor’s degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from MIT (1974) and a Ph.D. in geophysics from U.C. San Diego / Scripps Institute of Oceanography (1980). His thesis was on the crystallography of the manganese minerals found on the ocean floor. He was a post-doctoral fellow in physical chemistry at Caltech for two years after graduate school, where he built x-ray spectrometers. After leaving academia, he helped to found two small computer graphics companies, Cubicomp and Digital F/X, both in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of his projects at Digital F/X won an Emmy award for technical achievement in 1990.

After ten years at start-ups, he joined Electronic Arts, where he did some of the early work on 3D graphics on game consoles. Stephen then spent five years at Activision, where he ran the Santa Monica studio and third-party development. In that role, he created the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater product line, Activision’s first Spiderman and X-Men games, and several other multi-million selling titles. For the last three years, he has been at Midway Games where I’m currently the Chief Creative Officer.

Ian Lane Davis, former Technical Director at Activision's Santa Monica studio, is widely acknowledged as one of the top artificial intelligence experts in games. His direct game credits include Dungeon SiegeR: Legends of ArannaT (2003), Microsoft Game Studios; Empire Earth: The Art of ConquestT (2002), Sierra Entertainment; Jane'sR Attack Squadron (2002), Xicat Interactive; and for Activision Publishing, Inc., Star TrekR: Armada IIT (2001), Call to Power II (2000), Star TrekR: ArmadaT (2000), CivilizationR: Call to PowerT (1999), BattlezoneR (1998), Dark Reign: Rise of the ShadowhandT (1998), and Dark Reign: The Future of WarT (1997).

Dr. Davis serves as a trusted advisor to some of the most important publishers in the industry. Since founding Mad Doc in November 1999, he and his team have provided consulting and game development services for numerous leading publishers, including EA Games, Sierra, Midway, Microsoft and Activision.

The Mad Doctor's reputation has allowed him to attract the best and brightest in all disciplines, and the company's games have developed a reputation for incorporating the highest quality design, art and programming. He deliberately keeps his studio small to maintain an emphasis on quality, and so he can stay personally involved with each game produced at the company. Dr. Davis is active in the gaming community and serves as a Peer Panel Leader for the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Peer Panel for Gameplay Engineering. Davis is a highly sought speaker who presents in academic and game focused venues and has been interviewed for online, print and television media.

Davis earned his doctorate in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, one of the nation's leading computer engineering schools, where he performed research for DARPA on artificial intelligence in robotic Humvees.

Paul Debevec received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996. His Ph.D. Thesis presented a technique for photogrammetrically modeling and image-based rendering real-world architectural scenes from photographs. With these techniques he led the production of a photoreal model of the Berkeley campus for his 1997 SIGGRAPH film "The Campanile Movie", whose techniques were later used to create the virtual backgrounds in the "bullet-time" shots in the movie The Matrix. Debevec's papers at SIGGRAPH 97 and 98 presented techniques for High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) and Image-Based Lighting, allowing the full dynamic range of real-world lighting to be captured and used as lighting environments for CG objects. His 1998 HDRI film "Rendering with Natural Light" was recreated for an ATI Radeon 9700 demo showing its new HDR rendering capabilities at SIGGRAPH 2002. At USC's Institute for Creative Technologies, Debevec has led the development of a series of Light Stages for capturing how objects and people reflect light, and simulating their appearance in new environments. Face datasets from Light Stage 2 were used by Sony Pictures Imageworks to create photoreal digital versions of the lead actors for Spider Man II. Debevec's most recent film, "The Parthenon", virtually reunites the Parthenon and its sculptures and will premiere at the SIGGRAPH 2004 Electronic Theater. Debevec was the recipient of SIGGRAPH's first "Significant New Researcher Award" in 2001.

Dr. Seif El-Nasr earned her Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University, her master’s degree in Computer Science from Texas A&M University and her B. S. degree in Computer Science from the American University in Cairo. Dr. Seif El-Nasr received several awards, including 2nd best paper award at the International Conference of Virtual Storytelling, and Leadership Excellence Award from Texas A&M University. She is the co-director of the RAEL (Real-time Aesthetic and Experience Lab). Her research work includes designing and developing tools that enhance the engagement of interactive environments used for training, education, and/or games. She has designed and developed an intelligent interactive lighting design system that continuously and autonomously adjusts the lighting in interactive 3D environments to suit the artistic style dictated by the artist as well as the play context. She has also designed and developed novel techniques for designing and building believable characters and storytelling methods within interactive environments by borrowing from acting, screenwriting, and directing techniques. URL: http://faculty.ist.psu.edu/SeifEl-Nasr

Kenneth D. Forbus is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Computer Science and Education at Northwestern University. His research interests include qualitative reasoning, analogy and similarity, sketch understanding, spatial reasoning, cognitive simulation, reasoning system design, articulate educational software, and the use of AI in computer gaming. He received his degrees from MIT (Ph.D. in 1984). He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society. He is an Associate Editor of Cognitive Science and serves on the editorial boards of Artificial Intelligence, AAAI Press, and the Journal of Game Development. His email address is forbus@northwestern.edu.

Bradford Mott received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University in 2006. He also holds a B.S. in Computer Science, a B.S. in Computer Engineering, and an M.C.S. in Computer Science from North Carolina State University. His research interests span artificial intelligence, intelligent user interfaces, and computational linguistics. His dissertation work explored decision-theoretic models of narrative planning that rationally choose among candidate storyworld actions within interactive 3D learning environments. In addition to his academic experience, he has extensive experience in both the enterprise software and game industries. Currently, he works at Emergent Game Technologies helping to create state-of-the-art cross-platform middleware solutions for game development.

Theresa-Marie Rhyne is multimedia, computer graphics and scientific visualization expert. She was the founding visualization expert at the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Scientific Visualization Center from 1990 - 2000. Currently, she is Coordinator of Special Technology Projects with Learning Technology Service at North Carolina State University. She was on the Executive Committee of ACM SIGGRAPH from 1996 - 2000, served as the ACM SIGGRAPH 1996 Panels Chair, and formed the ACM SIGGRAPH Outreach to the Computer Games Community in 2000. In 2001, she was International Programme/Papers Co-Chair for the European Conference on Computer Graphics (Eurographics) 2001. In 2001, she also became a member of the Computer Graphics Pioneers Association.

Wouter van Oortmerssen started with a interest natural languages, which led him to a Masters in Computational Linguistics. He gradually switched over to programming languages, and created one of the most popular languages/compilers on the Amiga platform. He continued with a PhD in programming language design & implementation, after which he joined the Operating System design team at Amiga inc.

Next to his focus on programming language design, Wouter has always been a gamer, but when 3D in games became mature with Doom, his interest in games increased, first spending several years creating levels for Doom & Quake, then getting more serious as he wrote an entire single/multiplayer FPS game & engine from scratch, "Cube". After this he decided to join the german company Crytek to work on the shooter "Far Cry", which received much critical acclaim. Since then he joined The Guildhall at SMU, a graduate program for game development, teaching the Software Development track.

Michael Young is an associate professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. Michael received a bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the California State University in Sacramento in 1984, an MS in Computer Science with a concentration in Symbolic Computation from Stanford in 1989 and in 1998 a Ph.D. in Intelligent Systems from the University of Pittsburgh. He was awarded a national Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2000. Young was a founder and Conference Chair for the First Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment in 2005 and served as the Tutorials Chair for AIIDE-2006. Michael's current research interests are in artificial intelligence, planning algorithms, discourse generation and computational models of interactive narrative. Michael directs the Liquid Narrative research group, is the co-director of the NCSU Center for Digital Entertainment and is academic director of the North Carolina Serious Games Initiative.