Consultant & Developer, AiGameDev.com

Alex J. Champandard has worked in the entertainment industry as an AI programmer for many years, most recently for Rockstar Games. With a strong academic background in artificial intelligence, he has authored the book AI Game Development: Synthetic Creatures with Learning and Reactive Behaviors and often speaks about his research -- notably at the Game Developer Conference. Currently, Alex is a freelance consultant at games companies in central Europe, helping developers integrate state of the art techniques into commercial games. He maintains open source AI engines at http://AiGameDev.com where he also publishes tutorials for game programmers.

AnalogX

Mark most recently was founder and CTO of Solid State Networks, a next generation content delivery system used by game companies such as Acclaim and Wizards of the Coast. Prior to Solid State, he worked closely with Limelight Networks to develop their download delivery platform BulkGet, and was the Chief Software Architect for Aerocast, a joint venture between Liberty Media and General Instrument, which focused on video distribution over the Internet to cable set top boxes. Mark is also well known as the developer of AnalogX.com, an award winning site that distributes the many software utilities that he has written. AnalogX is known as a trusted brand in software utilities, guaranteed to be lightweight, high performance, and free of malicious code. Some of Mark's utilities have also been used by Microsoft (as XP PowerToys) as well as PC Magazine.

Director of Business Development, NCSOFT

Dallas Snell joined NCsoft as Director of Business Development in April 2006. As a veteran of the gaming industry, Dallas launched his career with the development and publication of the #1 graphic adventure game, The Quest, in 1983. Two years later, he joined Richard and Robert Garriott at Origin Systems. In 1986, Richard and Dallas jumped ship from Origin’s rather chilly New Hampshire offices, and founded Origin’s product development division in Austin, Texas. Shortly thereafter, Dallas became Origin’s Vice President of Product Development. During his tenure at Origin, Dallas managed, produced, or executive produced, over 50 original game titles, including such best-selling titles as the Ultima and Wing Commander series. After Origin’s acquisition by Electronic Arts in 1992, Dallas became Vice President & General Manager of the Origin division. In 1996, he left the gaming business to pursue other interests. However, the lure of multiplayer online games proved more than he could resist, and Dallas rejoined Richard and Robert at NCsoft in 2006

Creative Director, NCSOFT

Janus Anderson, Creative Director for the North American division of NCsoft, has accumulated more than 10 years of experience working as a designer and programmer in the games industry. His career has been focused exclusively on massively multiplayer games, beginning with the first generation graphical MMP, The Realm, published by Sierra On-line in 1997. Since then, Janus has been involved in the development of a wide variety of MMP titles, including Earth & Beyond, Puzzle Pirates, Shadowbane, and the upcoming NCsoft titles Dungeon Runners and Tabula Rasa.

Writer & Game Designer, Polar Productions

Matt Costello has written ground-breaking and award-winning novels, games, and television. Penguin published his latest novel, Nowhere, in 2007. Matt has scripted dozens of best-selling games including the critically acclaimed The 7th Guest and Doom 3. of which Time Magazine said, “The story is delivered with unusual art.”

Sole Proprietorship

Noah Falstein is the President of The Inspiracy (www.theinspiracy.com), a consulting firm specializing in game design and production. Designing and managing entertainment and educational software since 1980 for companies such as Williams Electronics, LucasArts Entertainment, The 3DO Company, and Dreamworks Interactive, Falstein has worked on everything from toys to CD-ROM games to edutainment to location-based entertainment. Some of his better known titles have included Sinistar, PHM Pegasus, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and Hungry Red Planet. Falstein is currently a leader in the emerging Serious Games field, having designed corporate training simulations and health-based games. He also serves on the advisory boards of the Games for Health Conference and the Serious Games Summit. He was the first elected chairman of the Computer Game Developers Association and for the last five years has written the monthly design column for Game Developer magazine. The Inspiracy does original design and design review for clients around the world, including both established game companies and those looking to apply game design technique to for purposes beyond entertainment.

User experience and foresight researcher, EPFL/Phoenix Studio

Cognitive scientist by training, Nicolas works as a research scientist at the Media and Design Lab (Swiss Institute of Technology, EPFL) in Lausanne, Switzerland and as a user experience and foresight researcher for Phoenix Interactive, a european video-game studio. His current research is geared towards the study of gaming experiences (location-based applications, virtual worlds, tangible interactions, ubiquitous computing). He is also the author of Pasta and Vinegar, a weblog about emerging technologies usage and foresight and is co-producer of the LIFT conference in Geneva.

Independent Art Director

Viktor Antonov art-directed and did concept design for Half-Life 2, the project that according to BBC news "has elevated gaming into an art form". Viktor is winner of the Visual Effects Society award. Half Life 2 has won a best art direction award by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, an outstanding art direction award by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, a best visual design, numerous best graphics awards and 33 game of the year honours worldwide. Viktor holds a transportation design degree from Art Center College of Design, and has over 10 years of experience in the entertainment industry as a conceptual designer, matte painter, art director and production manager. He was a designer for the animation feature Renaissance, a futuristic thriller, and did matte paining for the sci-fi series Skyland. Viktor’s responsibilities at Valve included the conception of the Half Life 2 universe - City 17, its suburbs and the alien " Combine " architecture and technology. Viktor is a designer and co-writer for the Crossing - an Arkane Studios FPS. The project is one of the most innovative to date, introducing a new genre of game: The Crossplayer experience, fusing Multiplayer with Singleplayer. Viktor Antonov has co-authored ‘Concept Art’, a book on concept design and has written numerous articles on design and art direction worldwide. He is currently working on an illustrated novel, "The Colony", and is a visiting design instructor at the Baden-Wuerttemberg Film Academy. He has founded the entertainment design studio "The Building", in Paris France.

Lecturer / Art dept manager, NHTV

Andrew Paquette started his career as an editorial illustrator in New York City in 1986. Since then, he has worked as a comic book artist/creator, video game artist/designer/art director/co-producer/cg supervisor, film fx animator/lighter/texture artist, and as an educator. Along the way, he became Alias/Wavefront's world's most prolific beta site, wrote training manuals for Rhythm & Hues, improved the Sony Pictures Imageworks fx pipeline with techniques that were applied to numerous films, and has started writing his first book on computer graphics, to be published by Springer/Verlag in London. While living in Arizona, he made paintings of the desert and exhibited them at the Taos and LeKae galleries of Scottsdale.

Lead Character Animator, Lux Animation

Larry has had extensive experience in 2D traditional and 3D character animation. He was animation director on the award-winning CG short SUBA-Jungle Robots. His previous animation background has included work for Disney Feature Animation (France) DUCKTALES: THE MOVIE - TREASURE OF THE LOST LAMP, and Warner Brothers INVASION OF THE BUNNY SNATCHERS. He is also a regular guest speaker at Oscar-winning John Canemaker's New York University Advanced Animation Program. He is currently supervising animation for a CG feature to be released in 2008.

Video Game Audio Instructor, Vancouver Film School

Leonard Paul attained his Honours degree in Computer Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in BC, Canada with an Extended Minor in Music concentrating in electroacoustics. He is a recognized lecturer on the topic of game audio and has given lectures at the Banff New Media Institute, the New Forms Festival, the Game Over 2005 Festival in Porto, the Games 2006 Conference in Portalegre and GDC 2007. He teaches video game audio full-time at the Vancouver Film School as well as being an independent game audio contractor with his company Lotus Audio. He started in the video game industry over ten year ago and is experienced in audio programming, sound design and music composition. Most recently, he was the audio director and sound designer for Sega's Sonic Rivals 2 (PSP), the composer for Death Jr. 2: Science Fair of Doom (NDS) and audio driver coder for Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 (PS2) having worked for companies such as Backbone Entertainment, Electronic Arts and Radical Entertainment.

Production/Project Management

Anne-Christine has been managing video games development for 11 years, working in France, the US and the UK for a variety of companies, including Mattel Media, Infogrames, BAM and SCEE London Studio. Prior to settling in the production seat, Anne-Christine worked as a programmer, tester, translator and localisation manager.

INDEPENDENT PRODUCER

Born and raised in New York City, Risa started her career in entertainment as a Playwright and Producer for theatre. With a degree in fine art, she moved to Paris and began working as a director and writer, then moved into multimedia and videogames; first as a designer and localization manager for, then project manager and publishing producer. As a producer, Risa has worked for Kalisto, Infogrames, Exmachina Image and Disney. She has worked in collaboration with Square, Namco, NEC, Microprose, Universal studios, Warner Bros, Moulinsart and ABC television. Her credits as a producer include: Dark Earth, Loons: fight for fame, Martian Alert, Martian Revenge, Lucky Luke: on the Dolton trail, Smurf Adventure, Loony Tunes racing, Adventures of Tintin, Dead to Rights; Piglets BIG Game, and Alias. She has won awards including Francis Newcomb 1997: Grant for Best play, Best voice recording 2000: Dark Earth and Best kids game 2003 in PS2 Magazine USA, for Piglets BIG game. In 2004 Risa became an independent producer and consultant, and has since worked in film as a special fx supervisor for the film “Night Junkies”, as a risk manager and auditor for video games seeking completion bonds from Film Finances inc. and International film guarantors and as production support to publishers and developers worldwide. Risa is also a member of the faculty at the Institute International Multimedia in Paris 3D production and video games.

President, Silicon Knights

Denis Dyack is the founder and president of Silicon Knights. In this capacity, he oversees the creation and development of games, and continues to further the growth of the company. Dyack is a noted authority on interactive software development and offers valuable insight into the process of designing next-generation games that appeal to the masses. Under Dyack’s direction, Silicon Knights has evolved into one of the top independent interactive software developers in the world. Dyack (B. Phed, H. B.Sc, M. Sc.) founded Silicon Knights in 1992 after publishing Cyber Empires in 1991. Since that time, Silicon Knights has moved from creating PC games to premiere AAA console titles, such as Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain for the original Playstation. Working with Nintendo as a second party, Silicon Knights created the critically acclaimed Eternal Darkness. Together with Nintendo, Silicon Knights worked with Konami to create another critically acclaimed game, Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. Dyack and his team are currently working with Microsoft® on the Too Human Trilogy™ for the Xbox 360, and developing an exciting new game for Sega of America.

Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner Microsoft, Xbox Live

David Edery is the “Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner” for Xbox Live Arcade. He is also a research affiliate of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program (CMS). Prior to joining Microsoft, David was the MIT CMS Program’s “Associate Director for Special Projects”. During that time, David co-founded the Convergence Culture Consortium (C3), a research partnership with corporations such as MTV Networks, Turner Broadcasting, and GSD&M. David also contributed to the growth of the CMS program’s game design curriculum, and managed Cyclescore, an exertainment project fusing original video games and stationary exercise equipment. David received his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he concentrated on marketing and entrepreneurship. Prior to receiving his MBA, David worked as a software engineer and founded a successful software development and consulting firm. Last but not least, a long time ago in a place far, far away, David received his BA in English Literature from Brandeis University. ( Published Articles: * Designing an MMORPG Feedback Rating System * Enhancing the Effectiveness of In-Game Advertising * In Defense of Episodic Content * The Producer Pay Question * Games as Lifestyle Brands * Reverse Product Placement in Virtual Worlds (HBR) Speaking History: * Games for Health Conference, Sept 2005. “Cyclescore: Lessons Learned” * Economics of Open Content Conference @ MIT, January 2006. “Games and User-Generated Content” * Game Marketing Conference, March 2006. “Blogs, Forums and Developers” * Austin Game Conference, September 2006. “Digital Distribution Revolution” * Game Developers Conference, March 2007. “Sharing Control” & “PC Gaming in an Age of Connected Consoles”

President, BreakAway ltd.

As CEO of BreakAway, Doug Whatley has over 20 years of successful game development and management experience in the interactive entertainment industry. Since he founded BreakAway, he has positioned the company as a leading developer of entertainment and serious games. He is a pioneer in developing innovative game technology applications for training, planning and concept analysis. BreakAway's customer base spans the largest publishers in the entertainment industry as well as high profile customers in the medical, military, homeland security and general industries. Doug was named an Ernst&Young Entreprenuer of the Year in 2004 and one of Business Week's 10 Cutting Edge Designers in 2006. In recognition for sustained growth, BreakAway has been named to Deloitte and Touch's Technology Fast 50 Program for three consecutive years.

CEO, Nadeo

I am the development director of the studio. Nobody wants to make my biography, so I have to do it. My only true video game job is since I co-founded Nadeo in 2000 and I must admit I was quite stupid. I tried to make difficult things, like games, with unusual methods and no experience at all. It made all this harder for the team and brought us less money. However, today, our audience is real, for VirtualSkipper and TrackMania. Because even if we are in some top100 best games of all times, the most important is that for many players, we are among their very favorites. And that is cool. Like the fact that TrackMania is the only European game at the eSports World Cup, that it has received prizes for being children-friendly and quotes such as "the first web 2.0 game" from GameStar or "...one of the most important models for online gaming that online gaming has ever seen." from Edge. And if you want to know my method, it is simple: I play like in a strategy game, but I think the gold mine is our team, not our players.

Sr. Graphics Architect, Intel & Khronos

Remi is working in the Advanced Visual Computing group at Intel as Sr. Graphics Architect. He previously worked in the R&D department of Thomson Training & Simulation leading the Space Magic real-time visual system, at Silicon Graphics managing the IRIS Performer software toolkit, as co-founder and Director of Technology at Intrinsic Graphics designing the Alchemy engine, and lately as Graphics Architect at Sony Computer Entertainment US R&D working on the PLAYSTATION®3 SDK.

Head of Eye Toy Technology, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

Mark has been working in the games industry for over 10 years. After completing a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at London Imperial College Mark originally started his career writing flight simulation software for British Aerospace.
After a number of years writing PC and PS2 technology code for independent developers Mark settled down four years ago at Sony’s London Studio where he has supported the technology development for well over a dozen EyeToy products. Mark is currently the Head of EyeToy Technology

Art Director, Crytek

Michael Khaimzon was born in Moscow, started his career more than 10 years ago in Israel where he worked as an art director on numerous multimedia projects and after that on an MMO title.
Six years ago he got an invitation to go to Germany and work for Crytek. Michael now works as an art director on Far Cry, and Crysis. Currently he his finalising Crysis and prototyping a new project.

Director – TwelveJ Limited

Kumar is the Director of Twelve J Limited, an UK based consultancy specialising in developing and implementing learning and development programmes in game development companies.
Kumar was formerly Vice President – Corporate affairs at Criterion Software Limited responsible for human resource management, finance and IT. He owns an MBA from Cranfield University School of Management.

CEO & Co-Founder of Blitz Games

Philip Oliver co-founded Blitz Games in 1990 with his twin brother Andrew Oliver following nearly ten years of designing and writing many UK No.1 titles including the very popular Dizzy series. Responsible for the company's overall management and direction he also ensures, along with his brother, that the company maintains its ongoing reputation for producing high quality playable games for the mass market. He is also a founder member and current board director of TIGA (The Independent Games Developers Association). Blitz Games was responsible for Sponge Bob: Creature from the Krusty Krab a Launch Title on the Wii. They have gone to produce 3 more Wii games, Bratz: The Movie, SpongeBob Atlantis SquarePantis and Karaoke Revolution: American Idol. Blitz Games has more Wii games in Production.

Chief Technical Officer, Blitz Games

Andrew Oliver is co-founder and co-owner of Blitz Games and took on the role of CTO when he and his twin brother Philip started the company in 1990 after 10 years of writing many popular games for the UK games market including the hugely successful Dizzy series. He is now responsible for all aspects of the company's technology and game development direction as well as ensuring that the company's reputation for high quality standards and prompt delivery is maintained. He is the current Chapter Leader of the UK Midlands Chapter of IGDA (International Game Developers Association).

Senior Character Artist, Ninja Theory

Stuart graduated from Bournemouth with an Animation degree and began his career with Sony Cambridge in 2001 creating characters and animations for Ghosthunter on the PS2. As part of Sony's Advanced Technology Group, he was granted early access to PS3 and was responsible for pushing boundaries and exploring new ideas and methods for next-gen character creation. This led to a pivotal role in creating the "Alfred Molina" realtime face demo for the PS3 press launch event at E3 2005. Stuart then channeled his experience into the highly anticipated PS3 title “Heavenly Sword” and grabbed the opportunity to become a Ninja. He took responsibility for facial development and was tasked with sculpting the digital faces, the facial expressions and supervising the facial animation.
He was fortunate to be part of the team involved in the performance capture sessions at WETA digital and even slipping into a motion capture suit to play a cowardly commander. Just don't mention his “precious” one line of dialog that was eventually over dubbed.

Lead visual designer Valve Software

Moby is the lead visual designer on the popular multiplayer fps Team Fortress 2.  He graduated from the Academy of Art San Francisco in 2001 with a BFA in illustration. He originally grew up on the small Caribbean island of St. Thomas, eventually finding his way to Valve software.

CEO, Darkworks

Antoine Villette created Darkworks, a Parisian video game developmet studio in 1998, together with Guillaume Gourraud. He is the company's current chairman. Darkworks has specialised from the outset in developing ambitious action/adventure games and has acquired the unquestioned status of a developer of quality games for consoles and PC, noted for the technological innovations and the awesome quality of their visual content. Darkworks currently boasts over 2 million copies sold in five continents of its two flagship productions: "Alone in the Dark", "The New Nightmare" (Infogrames - 2001) and "Cold Fear" (Ubisoft - 2005).
The company is working in the Xbox360 (Microsoft) and PS3 (Sony) development environments. The company is currently developing a new original project for both platforms, for one of the world's leading games publishers.

Console Lead Programmer, Cyanide

Nicolas started his career 10 years ago. First of all he exerted at Lagardere then in a financial group as Technical Director. Caught up by his passion for video games, he created a mobile game studio "Magic Productions". In 2 years, the studio ported many cult games on smart phones. "Another World", "Rick Dangerous", "Rod-Land or Cannon Fodder" are just a few of them. In 2006, the studio was bought by an English
group and Nicolas left to discover new horizons. He has been managing development of games on the DS and the Nintendo Wii since 2007, within Cyanide..

Managing Director, Ubisoft Annecy

Passionate about games and graduated in Computer science, Stephane entered the video game industry as game programmer in 1988. He quickly moved to various creative and management roles at Infogrames for over 10 years, before co-founding Eden Games in 1998 (V-Rally, Test Drive Unlimited). Over 2 decades, Stephane has produced more than 15 games, managing small creative teams (1988’s North & South) to large multi-site teams (2006’s Splinter Cell Double Agent). Stephane is currently Managing Director of Ubisoft Annecy, France. His studio has recently completed Dark Messiah Elements for the Xbox 360 and currently co-develops two major Ubisoft franchises on Wii, PS3 and 360.

Associate Producer, Crystal Dynamics

Arnab Basu is an Associate Producer at Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Interactive. In the past, he has managed the studio's shared design department and is now currently working on an unannounced next gen title. Mr Basu completed a Master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University, prior to which he received a BS in computer science and engineering from Bangalore, India. His professional interests lie in understanding, formulating and implementing innovative ideas for video game design and production.

Lead Design, Crystal Dynamics

Riley has spent his entire career at Crystal Dynamics which began in 1994.  After being a designer on projects like Solar Eclipse, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and Soul Reaver, he became a lead designer on Soul Reaver 2, Legacy of Kain: Defiance and then Tomb Raider: Legend.  Since then he's provided design support to other projects at Crystal Dynamics while focusing on development of original concepts as part of the studio’s shared design group.

Founder, DDM

Jeff has been widely recognized as one of the industry's leading agents, with over thirteen years of experience in interactive entertainment. In addition to providing business development and management expertise, he also has the valuable distinction of having represented both publishers and developers in the deal process. Beginning with his first client, Virgin Interactive, Jeff has negotiated hundreds of millions of dollars in worldwide development deals including such high profile franchises as Mario Strikers, Spiderman, Disney Properties, Sly Coooper and many more.

Business Development, Kuju

A born networker and relationship builder with proven sales skills and a track record of successful, high- value business development in the videogames industry, Joel has unrivalled experience as the long-time, deal-making face of one of the UK’s leading independent developers. Joel’s efforts directly lead to the growth of Kuju Entertainment into one of the largest independent development groups in the world.As a fifteen year old, in the summer of 1986, Joel failed to secure a job as a graphic artist with Codemasters. Having such a narrow escape at a young age from entirely the wrong career in the videogames industry, Joel proceeded to enjoy playing games whilst, as an adult, building a successful career in commercial software sales - selling high value Customer Relationship Management software to the telecoms industry.  Jumping at any chance to help creative professionals sell their output more effectively led Joel to form Increase Ltd – a sales effectiveness and CRM specialist. As an opportunity to use his skills within the videogames industry presented itself, Joel took a board position at Wide Games in Brighton, UK which later became Kuju Brighton where Joel used his experience and exhaustive contact list to build business for all of Kuju’s five studios. Joel has negotiated original IP and work-for-hire advance/royalty deals with all the world’s major videogame publishers on all formats. In 2007 Joel successfully closed greater than $22M of new business.

Project Lead& Senior Producer, EA Sports

David Ortiz is the Project Lead and Sr. Producer for the Madden NFL franchise at EA Sports. He is an 11 year veteran of the video games industry with a focus on porduction and design. In additon to several years of service at EA working on the Madden franchise, David has worked for Microsoft Games,  and was the Creative Director for the Sony Sports division.

Managing Director, Introversion Software

Mark graduated in 2001 with a computer Science Degree from Imperial College. Upon leaving he spent a year with Tom Arundel and Chris Delay founding Introversion Software with the launch of Uplink.  Due to a slightly uncertain future Mark returned to his univeristy sponsor – the Ministry of Defence – whilst continuing to work for Introversion part time. Since January 2007, Mark has been the full time Managing Director of Introversion Software.

Creative Director, Introversion Software

Chris studied Computer Science at Imperial and graduated with Mark Morris (Introversion) in 2001. After a short spell at Frontier Developments he left in order to pursue his own game ideas at Introversion. Individually responsible for Uplink, Chris partnered with Andy Bainbridge to produce Darwinia and is currently leading a team of four developing Multiwinia.

Director of Product Developmen, NCsoft Europe

Widely recognised as one Europe’s leading figures in the development and execution of online games from his time at Wanadoo, Bidaux was a leading member of the team that launched highly successful Dark Age of Camelot franchise. His talents were employed by the fledgling NCsoft Europe in September 2004, as one of the original core members. Over two years later, the Brighton UK office has massively increased from the original four members to a staff of more than 120 peoples. Thomas’ role at NCsoft is to manage the product development teams as well as researching and acquiring new titles.

CEO, Kuju

Ian graduated from Bristol University and worked on future weapon systems at British Aerospace before co-founding the games development business in 1989. Ian has been part of the executive team ever since. Now the CEO, Ian oversees Kuju’s 6 development studios with over 200 staff located across the UK. These studios produce games on almost all formats for some of the largest publishers in the world.

Producer, 10tacle Studios Vienna

Jurie Horneman has worked in the games industry for over 16 years. He has worked for French, Austrian, German and American companies, in roles ranging from producer and game designer to QA manager, lead programmer and
project manager. He is currently working as a producer at 10tacle Studios Vienna. He maintains Intelligent Artifice, a blog on game design,production and the games industry."

Creative Director, Beenox Studios

Thomas Wilson graduated from the Ringling School of Art and Design in Florida with a BFA in Graphic and Interactive Communications. With a little over 8 years in the game industry, Thomas has worked on multiple renowned licensed properties at A2M including Looney Tunes, The Grinch, Disney's Home on the Range and Ant Bully. His most recognized work was as Art Director on their original title Scaler. For the past two years Thomas has assumed the role of Creative Director at Quebec City based Beenox Studios. He is currently overseeing multiple next-gen projects based on licenses owned by Activision including the animated feature film Bee Movie.

CEO, Spir.Ops

Axel is one of the founders of Spir.Ops, a company which provides advanced AI services and tools. A PhD and several years working for different video game studios, such as Cryo and Polygon Studios, gave him the experience to create advanced tools to design next gen behaviors. Since the creation of Spir.Ops, he has worked with well known companies such as Ubisoft, and on different styles of games, from sport to FPS and adventure. As a middleware provider, Spir.Ops is aware of the latest needs of most video game projects, and tries to anticipate their wishes. Having projects on DS, PC, PS3 and Xbox 360, we have a great experience of AI platform dependencies.

Director of engineering school IMAC, Professor assistant in computer graphics and virtual reality, Gaspard Monge Institut

My studies were oriented to mathematics and computer science (engineering school) with a speciality in computer graphics. I choose my phD concern global illumination and, already, participating medium. Once professor assistant of the Paris Est University, I continued my work on this field, but also on a new field : virtual reality. I am a joung researcher but last year, i became director of a engineering school IMAC (see above) and I ma the team leader in computer graphics in my university.

PhD Researcher, INRIA

Bruno L\'evy is a researcher with INRIA. He did a Ph.D. (1996-1999) on
geometry processing. He then did a post-doc in Stanford university. He was hired by INRIA in 2000, and created ALICE in 2005, a new INRIA project-team on geometry processing. He has served on the program committes of
Eurographics, IEEE Visualization and the EG/ACM Symposium on Geometry
Processing, and was program co-chair of the ACM Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling in 2007 and 2008. He participated to two courses at SIGGRAPH, on mesh parameterization and mesh-based geometry processing. He contributed to start three companies (Earth Decision Sciences, VSP Technology and Scalable Graphics). His Least Squares Conformal Maps method is used by several popular 3D modelers. The texture packing algorithm developed by his team was integrated in Direct X. One of his algorithms was used by Eden Games in their "Alone in the Dark" game.

Senior Research Director, CNRS

Gérard Bailly is a senior CNRS Research Director detached at GIPSA-Lab, Grenoble-France. He is leading there the “Talking Machines, Conversational Agents and Face-to-Face Interaction” team, dedicated to multimodal speech analysis, synthesis and recognition. He has worked in the field of speech communication for more than 20 years. He supervised 20 PhD Thesis and authored 25 journal papers, 16 book chapeters, more than 200 papers in major international conferences and a patent with France Telecom R&D on “lip sync”. He coedited “Talking Machines: Theories, Models and Designs” (Elsevier, 1992) and “Improvements in Speech Synthesis” (Wiley, 2002). “Audiovisual speech processing” is under preparation with MIT Press. He co-organised the ESCA Autrans workshop (1991), the Journées d’Etudes sur la Parole (Aussois, 2000), the Smart Object Conference (Grenoble, 2003) and the Conference on Ambient Intelligence (sOc-EUSAI, 2005). He is a founder member of the ISCA SynSIG and SproSIG special-interest groups. His current interest is multimodal interaction with conversational agents using speech, hand and head movements and eye gaze.his algorithms was used by Eden Games in their "Alone in the Dark" game.

Assistant Professor, Rennes 1 University

Since September 2005, Fabrice Lamarche is a full time assistant professor at Université de Rennes 1 and member of the computer graphics research team Bunraku at IRISA, Rennes France. He obtained an ingeneer degree in computer sciences from INSA Rennes and a Master of Science (Computer Graphics and Artificial Intelligence) from the University of Rennes 1 in 2000 and defended his PhD in computer sciences entitled “Virtual Humans, reaction and cognition: an architecture for their autonomy” in 2003. His research interests are in the field of behavioural animation of virtual humans and focus on reactive and cognitive behaviour modelling, spatial subdivision, path planning, informed environments and crowd simulation.

Senior Application Engineer, Intel

Leigh Davies is an Senior Application Engineer at Intel Corporation in the UK. He joined Intel's Developer Relations Division in 2003 and focuses on providing technical support to the games industry in Europe. Prior to joining Intel he worked for 9 years as a PC programmer at several UK based games companies originally starting coding on an Intel 386. His last role prior to joining Intel was as a senior engine programmer at Silicon Dreams where he wrote the company's DirectX 3D engine that was used in several high profile commercial titles. His main areas of expertise are 3D graphics and multi-threading.

Software Developer, Illuminate Lab

Niklas studied at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He finished with a Master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering. In 2002 he started working in the development team at Illuminate Labs. Most of his work has been focused on developing rendering and Global Illumination algorithms.

Business developement director , ruCap Ltd.

Stanislav Velmakin, a business development director in ruCap Ltd., works with software developers on different innovation projects in game design and 3D visualization. Responsible for integration of WIDEGLANCE Technology into different products. After graduating from Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics in 1998 entered post graduate study in the same university. Took a part in several conferences and had some works in artificial intelligence and intelligent agents.

Senior Researcher, CNRS

Pierre Bessière is a senior researcher at CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) since 1992. He took his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence in 1983 from the Institut National Polytechnique of Grenoble, France. He did a post-doctorate at the Stanford Research
Institute and then worked for several years in the computer science industry. He has been working for the last 15 years on evolutionary algorithms and Bayesian inference. He leads, a research group on stochastic models for perception, inference and action (Bayesian-Programming.org) and gave rise to 2 European projects : BIBA (Bayesian Inspired Brain and Artifacts) and BACS (Bayesian Approach to Cognitive Systems). He is a scientific counselor and one of the cofounders of ProBAYES (probayes.com), a company offering probabilistic decision tools.

Postdoctoral Researcher, Computer Science, Paris, LIP6

Charles studied Computer Science in Brazil, where he obtained his MSc degree in Software Engineering with emphasis in game engines. In 2007, he obtained a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Paris 6, where he developed STRADA, a novel approach for learning adaptive behaviours for modern strategy game NPCs. He is currently Postdoctoral Fellow at LIP6. His current research covers areas such as machine learning, decision-making under uncertainty, abstraction and multi-agent systems. His application domains are modern computer games and interactive television.

Assistant Professor at LJK , INRIA, University of Grenoble I

François Faure completed a Ph.D. thesis in Computer Science at University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France in 1997.  He previously studied Mechanical Engineering at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan.  His research interests are mostly about the interactive physically based animation of complex scenes.  François is an Assistant Professor at LJK computer graphics lab, CNRS, INRIA, University of Grenoble I.

Assistant Professor at LJK , INRIA, University of Grenoble I

Jacques Lemordant (PHD 1980) is a member of the WAM Project which is working on multimedia documents at INRIA (http://wam.inrialpes.fr). He is also teaching XML technologies, multimedia programming and game design on mobiles at the Joseph Fourier University of Grenoble (France). Jacques Lemordant was a scientific leader in  european and national multimedia projects and  has directed several PhD students. He is now actively working in the field of  3D and interactive audio for games on mobiles and GPS-based sound landscapes.

PhD, IRIT

Vincent Forest obtained a "Diplôme Universitaire de Technologie" in computer science at the university Paul Sabatier of Toulouse. Then he obtained a bachelor in computer science before to prepare a master's degree in image and language. During his master, he worked on real time rendering of Bidirectional Texture Functions and their possible use in the rendering of complex scenes.  He is currently a third year PhD student under the direction of Mathias Paulin at the "Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse" (IRIT). They are working on the efficient computation of accurate shadows as well for quality sensitive applications than for performance critical ones. In order to correct penumbra overlapping artifacts, they firstly propose a blending heuristic for the penumbra-wedge algorithm. This presentation describes a more general solution to generate accurate shadows.

PhD, LIP6, Paris 6

Vincent Corruble was born and raised in Normandy, north-west of France. He studied Engineering in France, specialized in Systems Engineering and Intelligent Systems at the University of Virginia (US), and then in Artificial Intelligence at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6) where he obtained his PhD. He has had experience, both in academia and industry, in a number of applications of the fields of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, from data-mining to the simulation of the scientific discovery process. In recent years, as Assistant Professor at LIP6, he has focused on learning from an agent perspective, where learning is only one stage in the perception/action loop. From that perspective, he has worked with Computer Games as ideal test-beds for new Intelligent Agent technologies, with a specific concern to make concrete contribution to this growing area.

Computer science engineer, CEDRIC

Viviane Gal is computer science engineer. She teaches in the video and interactive media master at ENJMIN, and in the mobiles and embedded systems master at CNAM. She’s passionate about computer games and in 2001 she joins S. Natkin’s research team on Networks Systems and Multimedia at CEDRIC lab. Her research deals with study and definition of computer game development process and their execution plateform. In the « Jeu Interactif Multi-joueurs Mobiles » RIAM project, she collaborated to the definition and the experiment of a mobile video game design methodology. She also worked on distributed systems and networks formal specification and testing.

Phd University of Lyon, game developer, Etranges Libellules

Benjamin Segovia is a French game developper. He did a PhD (2004-2007) on computer graphics and rendering techniques in the University of Lyon. For three years, he developped different Monte-Carlo rendering and global illumination algorithms using either GPU approaches or CPU coherent ray tracing techniques.  He recently left the research field to join the French game company, « Etranges Libellules » to develop rendering algorithms on current game platforms.

Lecturer, University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble

Paul Amblard is lecturer in University Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, Laboratory TIMA. His interests are in circuits design and computer architecture. The work on CELL is done for comparison between this MPSoC and other ones under study in the laboratory.

Research scientist, INRIA Rhône-Alpes

Bruno  Raffin  is  research scientist at INRIA Rhône-Alpes Grenoble.  He received a Ph.D. on parrallel computing  from  the  Université d’Orléans in 1997. After a 2 year postdoc in USA working on large parallel computers, he returned to France to work on solutions to run multi-display virtual environments with  PC clusters equiped with commodity  graphics cards.  Today his research activity focuses on high performance interactive computing,   virtual reality and new interaction techniques. GrImage is its favorite experimental platform.

Professor at the Université of Paris 8, IUT Montreuil

Since 2002 Catherine Pelachaud is professor at the Université de Paris 8, IUT de Montreuil. She is currently in delegation at INRIA-Rocquencourt. She received her PhD in computer graphics at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA in 1991. Her research interests include embodied conversational agents, modelling of nonverbal communication (gaze, facial expression, gesture) and of emotions, representation language, multimodal interfaces. She has participated and participates to national and European projects on the topics of multimodal communication (EAGLES, IST-ISLE), of the creation of believable embodied conversational agents (IST-MagiCster, RIAM-ACE, ANR-MyBlog-3D), of the emotions in multimodal interfaces (NoE Humaine, IP CALLAS), in the domain of handicap (CNRS-Robea Hugex, RIAM LABIAO).

Arnaud Carré Technical Director, Darkworks

Self-taught Arnaud Carré holds a baccalaureate in maths and has been working for over 13 years in the video game industry. He has taken part in many successful French games, first at Delphine-Software, with "Shaq-Fu" (Megadrive, 1994), "Fade-to-black" (PC, 1995) and "Moto-racer" (PC, 1997). In 1998 he trained at SCEPIA in industrial database management methods. In 2000 he returned to video games at Atari. (“Tintin objectif aventure”, PS1 2000). Arnaud Carré is currently technical director of the technology and tools department at Darkworks where he has implemented the production line for multi-platform games for Playstation2, Xbox and PC. The line was used for the ColdFear game in 2005. He has also implemented and is currently development co-operative projects such as PLAY-ALL (PC-Xbox360-Playstation3, 2007).

Hubert Sarret, Technical Director, Kylotonn
With a passion for games Hubert Sarret joined the Research and Development department at UbiSoft in 1994. The following year he moved to Cryo where he took part in creating four games: Hardline (PC, 1996), Riverworld (PC, 1998), 360 (PC, unreleased 1999) and The New Adventures of the Time Machine (PC, 2000). With such extensive experience behind him, Hubert joined Wanadoo Edition in 2000 as technical director to set up the development studio (Inquisition, PC, PS2, 2003). In 2005 he took part in the Kylotonn adventure and joined the team as Technical Director. He worked in particular on the games “Bet On Soldier: Blood of Sahara” (PC, 2006), “Bet On Soldier: Blackout on Saigon” (PC, 2007) and “SpeedBall 2” (PC, 2007).

Head of the ARTEMIS Department at the GET/INT

Professor at the GET/INT, Françoise PRETEUX is an international expert in visual communications and the French representative at the ISO multimedia standardisation organisation. She is the head of the ARTEMIS Department at the GET/INT, she created seven years ago. Nowadays, ARTEMIS is labelled by EU as an excellence centre in 3D modelling for multimedia communications. Françoise PRETEUX managed numerous R&D national and European projects in her scientific interest fields: 3D graphics representation in fixed and mobile environments, coding, indexing and protection of multimedia contents. Françoise PRETEUX holds an MS degree in engineering from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris and a Doctorat d'Etat ès Sciences Mathématiques degree from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. She is a Doctor Honoris Causa from the
University Polithenica of Bucarest (Romania).

Associate Professor in the ARTEMIS Department at the GET/INT

Marius Preda is an Associate Professor in the ARTEMIS Department at the GET/INT. He received an Engineer Degree in Electronics from University POLITEHNICA (Bucharest, Romania) in 1998, and a Ph.D. Degree in Mathematics and Informatics from University Paris V - René Descartes (Paris, France) in 2001. His research interests include generic virtual character definition and animation, rendering, low bitrate compression and transmission of animation, multimedia composition and multimedia standardization. Marius Preda is actively involved in MPEG-4 since 1998, especially focusing on Video and Face & Body Animation (FBA) coding He is currently the chairmen of MPEG-4 3D Graphics group. He is the main contributor of the new animation tools dedicated to generic synthetic objects, promoted by MPEG-4 as part of AFX (Animation Framework eXtension) specifications. He is Co-Editor of AFX specifications and, since 2001, Editor of MPEG-4 documents related to 3D Graphics.

Senior Application Engineer, Intel

Leigh Davies is an Senior Application Engineer at Intel Corporation in the UK. He joined Intel's Developer Relations Division in 2003 and focuses on providing technical support to the games industry in Europe. Prior to joining Intel he worked for 9 years as a PC programmer at several UK based games companies originally starting coding on an Intel 386. His last role prior to joining Intel was as a senior engine programmer at Silicon Dreams where he wrote the company's DirectX 3D engine that was used in several high profile commercial titles. His main areas of expertise are 3D graphics and multi-threading.

Founder, Veloce Interactived

Fred Moreau, Veloce Interactive founder, begins in 1997 as freelance 3D artist, multimedia developer and trainer. In 1998, he joins Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), as Application Engineer and Computer Graphics Specialist. For six years, he assists several production studios in their challenges, and work closely with Autodesk development teams to constantly enhance the best production tools available today, praised by Film and Video Games industries. In 2004, he joins the RTZen team as Real Time 3D Specialist. RTZen, a startup company based in Seattle, develops the first software package that “allows artists to program” GPU based effects for game developers; RTShader. Member of the IGDA (International Game Developer Association), he speaks at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, March 2005. Since August 2005, Veloce Interactive supports several game developers in their technical and production challenges and in their teams’ training.

Technical Support Engineer, Perforce Software

Sven Erik Knop joined Perforce in January 2007 as a Technical Support Engineer, Trainer and Consultant. He previously worked as Principal Consultant for Versant, an Object Database provider. Sven Erik has extensive knowledge in C++ and Java, data modeling and relational and object databases. In his spare time he likes to spend time with his young family and practice his Karate and Piano.

Managing Director of the Casual Games Association

Before founding the Casual Games Association, Jessica held development, publishing and distribution positions inside the casual games industry. Most recently as VP Product Planning at FUN Technologies, a Liberty Media Company. Jessica was responsible for the product portfolio including game catalogue, website design and user experience of skill, community and casual download product offerings. Before working in casual games distribution, Jessica was responsible for internally developed PC download and Web Games and the externally published Launch Xbox Live Arcade Titles at Oberon Media's Seattle Studio which included creation of the studio, hiring the team and managing the projects. Jessica spent five years working as a Software Engineer in Retail PC and Xbox console development on Dungeon Siege and Gabriel Knight III. Prior to joining the ranks of game development, she was in the UW Physics PhD program and spent several years in academia pursuing scientific research and teaching in Mathematical Biology and Physics.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R Project Manager, GSC Game World

Anton Bolshakov, 29, is currently the Project Manager for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and has been involved in practically every other project released by GSC Game World, primarily in the field of management. Anton is a co-founder of GSC Game World studio and is its COO.

PR Director, GSC Game World

Oleg Yavorsky, 28, occupies the position of PR Director at GSC Game World and has been involved in PR, marketing and communication with regards to all the GSC projects since year 2000.

Professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM), Paris

Stéphane Natkin is professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) in Paris. He is at the head of the Graduate School on Games and Interactive Media (ENJMIN) (hppt://www.enjmin.fr). He has worked in the field multimedia systems, video games and critical computer system both from the research and the industrial points of view. He is the vice president of the technical group on games of Paris Region pole of excellence (Cap Digital). He has been the chairman or a keynote speaker in numerous international conferences related to computer entertainment. He acted as curator for the world event on games “Creation Numérique et Jeux Vidéo” (Digital Creation and Video Games) at “la Cite de Sciences” Paris, 2006.

CEO, Kynogon

After graduating from the Ecole des Mines de Paris in 1987, Pierre developed his expertise in Artificial Intelligence at the CAOR laboratory of the Ecole des Mines in Paris. He then joined Matra Cap System where he has continued research on A.I. After an MBA at Insead, he worked four years in management consulting at AT Kearney. At Kynogon, Pierre is the CEO in charge of R&D, Product Development and Technical Support