Emerging Arts Fest

Régine Debatty writes about the intersection between art, design and technology on her blog we-make-money-not-art.com as well as on design and art magazines such as Art Review (UK) . She also curates art shows and speaks at conferences and festivals about the way artists, hackers and interaction designers (mis)use technology.

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Kati London researches, designs, and develops technology for interactive crowdsource and disruptive experiences. Her work includes hardware for networking plants and people (Botanicalls), game structures that connect residents of Gaza City and Tel Aviv or Baghdad and New York (You Are Not Here), and wearable devices that detect personal space (Urban Sonar).

Her collaborative projects have been featured at Where 2.0, Come Out & Play and Conflux, and have appeared on Good Morning America, the BBC, NPR, and in The New York Times. She currently works as a senior producer and game designer for area/code in New York.

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Biography coming soon.

Scott Varland is a masters candidate at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), graduating in the spring of 2008 after completing substantial research in game design, social networking, physical computing, and human computer interaction. He previously served as Technology Director for GTCR Golder Rauner, LLC, a private equity firm managing more than $8 billion in equity and mezzanine capital. Prior to that, he served as Systems Engineer for Communications Equity Associates, a global investment bank with expertise in the media, entertainment, and communications industries. He earned a BFA from NYU in experimental theater.

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Adam Simon is a masters candidate at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), graduating in the spring of 2008 after completing substantial research in game design, social networking, physical computing, and human computer interaction. He most recently worked as a game producer and wireless consultant for area/code, one of the world’s leading real-world gaming companies. Previously, he produced original online content in the Digital Media division of CBS. Prior to that, he served as Digital Media Manager for acclaimed marketing firm Conductor, designing content delivery strategy. He earned a BA in theater from UCLA.

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Michael Dory is a designer, artist and researcher currently focusing on ubiquitous computing, game design and human computer interaction as a masters candidate at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

He’s previously worked with IBM, Nikon, Sony and Vision Education & Media on projects ranging from public relations and peer media strategy to interaction design and product prototyping. His personal and collaborative projects, including including the audio graffiti project Concrete Crickets and networked social game Socialbomb have appeared in/on/at the New York Times, National Public Radio, Conflux Festival, BoingBoing, and MAKE Magazine.

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Dr. Paul M. Torrens is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University, an Affiliate in the Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity, and an Affiliate in the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation. He is also Director of Geosimulation Labs, LLC, a research and development consultancy. He holds a Ph.D. from University College London (2004), Master’s degrees from Trinity College Dublin (1999) and Indiana University (1998), and a Bachelor’s degree from Trinity College Dublin (1996). His research is focused on Geographic Information Science and development of geosimulation and geocomputation tools, applied modeling of complex urban systems, and new emerging cyberspaces. His projects have been supported by the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Herberger Foundation, Science Foundation Arizona, Autodesk, Inc., and Alias Research. His work earned him a CAREER Award from the U.S. National Science Foundation in 2007. (See http://geosimulation.org for more details.)

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Biography coming soon.

Biography coming soon.

Andrea Vaccari is research assistant at the Senseable City Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is studying the integration of information and communication technologies in the built environment, and their implications in the social dynamics that drive city life itself. Throughout initiatives like WikiCity and the New York Talk Exchange, currently featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the laboratory aims to leverage the huge volume of real-time geo-referenced data provided by digital devices and sensor networks to better understand cities as real-time control systems, and to provide new tools to innovate and anticipate the effects of such innovations. Vaccari is currently completing his M.Sc. in computer engineering at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy and the joint program in computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Tucker Balch is a professor of Interactive Computing and Robotics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He earned a Bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. also at Georgia Tech. Balch was a member of the Robotics faculty at CMU from 1999 to 2001. He has published over 150 technical papers, journal articles, book chapters and books in the areas of robotics, computer vision and machine learning. He sleeps only once per week. When he does sleep, he sleeps in a chair.

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Stewart Tansley is responsible for Robotics and Embedded Devices in External Research & Programs at Microsoft Research. He has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence applied to Engineering from Loughborough University, UK. He has authored a variety of papers on robotics for education, artificial intelligence and network management, and co-authored a book on software engineering for artificial intelligence.

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