IEEE Dallas Consumer Electronics Society

www.DallasCES.org

 

They Speak in Pixels!

Interactive Digital Games as the 21st Century’s Mode of Human Expression

 

                                                                                               

                                         

Date:            Tuesday, Nov 1st, 2005

Lunch/Chapter business:  11:30 AM – 12:00 P.M.

Program:  12:00 ~ 1:00 P.M.

 

Place:              Holiday Inn Select, Richardson

                        (1655 N. Central Expressway (US 75), Richardson, TX 75080)

                       

Speaker:    Dr. Peter E. Raad, Ph.D., P.E. Linda Wertheimer Hart Professor and Executive Director, The Guildhall at SMU

                                                                                                                                                           

 

Abstract

Everyone and everything communicates.  Over time, humans have devised and used different means of communications, surely to coexist, survive, and organize, but also to build and maintain connections with family, friends, coworkers, and so on.  Some humans have sought to communicate more broadly across space and time, not so much connecting with familiar beings, but rather planting ideas.  Other humans, however, sought to focus their communications inwardly in pursuit of personal discovery and growth.  With technological advances came naturally new media of communications with ever increasing reach and power.  The pace of technological advancement, however, has not been constant over human existence, but has rather been constantly accelerating.  The most recent advent of the information age with its technologies of networking and interactivity have dramatically changed how we live, learn, work, and play.  These technologies have also changed how we choose to organize ourselves – the very essence of the notion of community – as well as how we discover, communicate, and grow.  Video games are a strong manifestation of the power of interactive networked technologies, and the arts and sciences that underpin digital game development open up new and exciting avenues of human thought, discovery, and growth.  As we learn how to harness the coupling of bits and neurons, we will be bringing together imagination, thinking, feeling, and expression, with heretofore unfathomable consequences on every aspect of the human experience.  What will we say with pixels?

The Guildhall at SMU was incubated in 2002 as a direct response to the expressed needs of the gaming industry’s leaders for professionals who have been educated and trained at the intersection of the arts and sciences of digital game development.  The novel curriculum that emerged combined the benefits of the academic and apprenticeship models to help produce immediate practitioners and future leaders for an emerging discipline that will undoubtedly play a key role in how human beings will express themselves and interact.  Representative examples of the creative expressions of Guildhall students will give us the opportunity to experience what they are saying in pixels.

 

Resume Summary:   Dr. Peter E. Raad

Peter E. Raad received the BSME (with Honors), MS, and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In 1986, he joined the mechanical engineering department at SMU as an Assistant Professor and is currently a Full Professor.  He holds the Linda Wertheimer Hart Professorship and is the founding Director of the Linda and Mitch Hart eCenter at SMU, a university-wide center established in 2000 to stimulate, facilitate, and support innovative multi-disciplinary activities that enable the creative and responsible development and use of interactive network technologies.  Under his leadership, the Hart eCenter incubated in 2002 The Guildhall at SMU, a novel industry-university collaborative educational program designed from the ground up to educate and train future practitioners and innovators in the fast-growing field of digital game development. The program underscores the belief that the arts and sciences of interactive digital media, which reside at the intersection of information technology and cognitive sciences, are the 21st century’s mode of human discovery and expression. Prior to becoming the founding director of the Hart eCenter and Executive Director of the Guildhall, Prof. Raad served as the Associate Dean of the SMU School of Engineering, in charge of all academic affairs, research and graduate studies, and computer operations. Between 1990 through 1993, he held the J. Lindsay Embrey Trustee Professorship in Engineering, an endowed chair for an outstanding junior faculty member. He has received several awards, including four times the Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award, twice the Outstanding Undergraduate Faculty Award, and the Sigma Xi Faculty Research Award. In 1999-2000, he was named the ASME North Texas Section Engineer of the Year. Prof. Raad has published over 40 articles and over 100 conference papers. He has received over $2.5M in funding from government and industry in support of his extensive research in tsunami mitigation and fluid wave interactions with solid structures, as well as his founding in 1995 of an industry-university collaborative laboratory dedicated to the computational modeling and laser-based measurement of nanoscale electronic devices.

 

There is no cost, nor membership requirement to attend this meeting.

 

For additional information, please contact Will Lumpkins at (214) 542-0858

xillia@ieee.org or Sam Broyles at (214) 480-3232 sam.broyles@ti.com

 

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