Contributor Biographies

Contains bios for those contributors who submitted one.

Dr. Doug Binks, D.Phil.

Doug Binks is a senior application engineer with the Visual Computing Software Enabling group at Intel, working with game developers to assist their development on Intel architectures such as Larrabee and multi-core CPUs. Prior to joining Intel in 2008, he worked in the games industry in roles ranging from graphics programmer to head of studio, and more recently as R&D development manager at Crytek GmbH, where he oversaw development of the CryENGINE 2. Doug holds a doctorate in physics from Oxford University, and he undertook two postdoctoral posts as an academic researcher in experimental nonlinear pattern formation, specializing in fluid mechanics. His earliest memories are of programming assembly on the ZX81. Udeepta Bordoloi

Udeepta Bordoloi is an engineer at AMD working on GPU compute technology. He obtained his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University and has previously worked in the field of medical visualization. He has interests in image processing, graphics, scientific visualization, and GPU compute. Igor Borovikov

Igor Borovikov graduated from the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology with an M.Sc. in physics and later completed his Ph.D. in math. His career highlights include senior researcher at the Institute of Microelectronics (Moscow); AnimaTek Intl, where he was one of the leads for World Builder; and SCEA, where he worked on a bestselling title. After working at Kerner Technologies as Chief Scientist on a novel video compression technique, he moved back to computer games. Currently, he is at Electronic Arts on The Sims 3 project. His research interests include differential geometry, computer vision, AI, and more.

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Cyril Brom

Cyril Brom wrote his first game on PMD 85, a socialist Czechoslovakia computer with a wonderful keyboard, at the age of 11. He spent the next decade persuading his friends to program games with him and to read sci-fi stories he wrote. Finally, Cyril graduated in computer science from Charles University in Prague, where he now leads the research group Artificial Minds for Intelligent Systems and persuades his students to finish their degrees. Cyril’s research relates to gaming AI, serious games, and computational neuroscience. The most recent game-related projects he was involved in include Europe 2045, a serious strategy game for teenagers about the European Union, and Pogamut, a toolkit for fast prototyping of AI of 3D virtual characters. Eric Brown

[email protected] Eric Brown lives in North Salt Lake, Utah. He is currently employed at Rockwell Collins writing simulation software for commercial and military flight simulators. He has worked in the game industry for four years, working on physics and animation systems. He received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Utah Valley University and is currently working on a Ph.D. in theoretical physics at the University of Utah. Phil Carlisle

Phil Carlisle is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Bolton in Bolton, England. He also runs a small independent game development company called MindFlock Ltd, which specializes in AI-based social simulation games. Prior to joining the University, Phil spent a number of years working on the Worms franchise of games for Team17, contributing to several titles in the multimillion-selling franchise. Phil has a BSc honors degree in computing from Leeds Metropolitan University and is currently researching the areas of emotional agents and “digital actors” for his Ph.D. He is currently engaged in establishing models of lifelike and believable game characters in order to spread the knowledge of how to incorporate emotion into game characters by example. Michael Dailly

Michael Dailly is a veteran games programmer of more than 20 years. Having started his professional career back in 1989 on a Commodore 64 for DMA Design, he then stayed with them for almost 10 years, helping them create some of the most recognizable games ever made. Through his love of R&D, he can lay claim to having inspired both the Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto series of games. Enjoying all disciplines, he refuses to specialize in any particular field, and this general knowledge has allowed him to work as a simple games coder, a 3D engine architect, an AI programmer, a platform architect, a network programmer, a head of research and development, and a technical manager. He has a passion for older machines and believes they still have much to teach us on how to get the best from modern-day systems.

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Peter Dalton

[email protected] Peter Dalton is a senior engineer at Smart Bomb Interactive, leading a team of engineers to build and maintain their in-house game engine targeted at the Xbox 360, Wii, and PlayStation 3 platforms. Prior to joining Smart Bomb Interactive in 2005, he worked as the programming director for Glyphx Games and filled the role of technical director for Beyond Games. In his past eight years in the industry, he has shipped more than six titles, including Advent Rising, Pac-Man World Rally, The Bee Game, and the upcoming Xbox 360 Live title, Snoopy Flying Ace. Peter was a contributing author to Game Programming Gems 2 and Best of Game Programming Gems. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a bachelor’s in computer engineering from the University of Utah. Go Utes! Kevin Dill

Kevin Dill has developed AI for seven titles: Master of Orion 3, Kohan II: Kings of War, Axis & Allies, Zoo Tycoon 2: Endangered Species, Zoo Tycoon 2: Marina Mania, Iron Man, and the upcoming Red Dead Redemption. He is currently working for Lockheed Martin on AI for serious games. When not coding, Kevin teaches classes on game AI and game programming, works as a technical editor for Charles River Media, and serves on the organizational committee for the AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference. He also writes articles and gives talks on the topic of AI for games and has in the past served as a section editor for the AI Game Programming Wisdom series. Jean-Francois Dube

[email protected] Jean-Francois Dube has been working at Ubisoft Montreal since 1997 and is currently working on Splinter Cell: Conviction as a senior engine programmer. Previously, he held the role of technical architect on Rainbow Six: Vegas 1 and 2, which shipped on PC, 360, and PS3. He also worked as a 3D programmer on games such as Rainbow Six 3 on Xbox and many other Ubisoft PS2 games. His main interests are code optimization, software rendering, compiler design, and drinking a lot of coffee. He accepts emails at the above address to discuss his articles or other related topics. Dominic Filion

[email protected] Dominic Filion is a senior software engineer at Blizzard Entertainment, where he has been hard at work on the upcoming StarCraft II for the past few years. He has worked for a decade in the games industry, acting as technical director or principal architect on three different commercial 3D engines at several game companies. During the rare moments when he is not obsessing about improving StarCraft II’s graphics, Dominic would enjoy feedback on the material presented here, so feel free to drop him a note.

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Contributor Biographies

Marco Fratarcangeli

[email protected] Marco Fratarcangeli (Ph.D. 2009, Univ. of Rome Sapienza) currently works at Taitus Software, focusing on the development of cross-platform graphical modules, such as planet rendering and information visualization, useful in planning and analysis of artificial satellite missions. During his academic activities, Marco researched mainly on novel methods for automatic rigging of facial animation through physical simulation and motion retargeting. His current interests include physically based animation, game development, high-performance terrain rendering, and natural human-computer interfaces. Nico Galoppo

Nico Galoppo grew up in Belgium, the land of mussels, beer, chocolate, and frietzakken. He has lived and studied all around the world—from the tiny Tremelo and Chapel Hill to the bigger Leuven, Grenoble, and Zurich. Currently, he enjoys living and breathing in the sparkling city of Portland, Oregon, in the beautiful American Northwest—filled with great eats and culture and close to gorgeous scenery in abundance. Nico currently holds a position as senior graphics software engineer with the Visual Computing Group at Intel in Portland, Oregon. He graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina while collaborating with his advisor, Professor Ming C. Lin, and Dr. Miguel A. Otaduy. His Ph.D. research related mainly to physically based animation and simulation of rigid, quasi-rigid, and deformable objects; adaptive dynamics of articulated bodies; hair rendering; and many other computer graphics–related topics. He also has experience with accelerated numerical algorithms on graphics processors. Nico also holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and he has published several peer-reviewed papers in various ACM conference proceedings. He has given talks at several ACM SIGGRAPH and ACM Symposium of Computer Animation conferences. Benedict R. Gaster

Benedict R. Gaster is a principal engineer at AMD, where he is the OpenCL architect. He obtained his Ph.D. from Nottingham University and has worked on compilers for both sequential and parallel languages for more than a decade. His interests are in programming language specification, compilation, and particularly in techniques for the emerging massively parallel processing offered by modern GPUs. Gero Gerber

Gero Gerber started working in the games industry as a software engineer at Ascaron Entertainment in 2000, working on ANSTOSS Action. He later joined Phenomic Game Development, working on SpellForce 2, where he was responsible for UI and

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network systems. In 2006, Gero continued working at Electronic Arts (EA Phenomic) on BattleForge and became lead software engineer on the BattleForge Live Team and responsible for UI tools and server functionality. Gero studied computer science at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Dortmund, Germany. Joshua Grass, Ph.D.

Joshua Grass is the simulation lead at Surreal Software (part of WB Games), where he is responsible for the AI framework and modeling the population of a large city. He has worked in the commercial game industry for more than 10 years, including at Bungie and Microsoft. Prior to that, Josh was a shareware game author on the Macintosh. He started programming on an Atari 800 and saved his first programs on cassette tapes. Josh has a doctorate in computer science, specializing in artificial intelligence and value-driven information gathering. He and his three boys are on a quest to finish every tower defense game ever made. His wife is very understanding. Robert Jay Gould

[email protected] At the age of 8, Robert Gould began programming games on his Commodore 64 together with his friends. However, instead of delving into computer sciences, he took the route of biotechnology and bioinformatics. After some detours along the way, he completed his graduate studies in Japan working on population dynamics and joined the local game industry due to his interests in artificial intelligence, data mining, and complex systems. Currently, he is a systems and network programmer at Square-Enix, and he is quite busy working on the game servers for Final Fantasy XIV. Neil Gower

[email protected] Neil Gower has worked on games and related entertainment technology since 1998. After completing his degree in computer science and AI, the challenges of real-world programming focused his attention on software engineering, while his interest in code optimization and eye candy led him to computer graphics. He continues to stay in touch with his academic roots as an ACM Professional and SIGGRAPH member. Today, Neil runs Vertex Blast, an independent software services company providing on-demand programming skills to the entertainment industry. Hunter Hale

Hunter Hale is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) working in the Game Intelligence Group. He earned his master’s degree in computer science from UNCC in 2008. His research interests include spatial representations for artificial intelligence, computational geometry, graphics and rendering, and artificial intelligence for games and simulation.

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Mark Harris

[email protected] Mark Harris is a senior developer technology engineer at NVIDIA, where he works with developers around the world on software for computer graphics and high-performance computing. His research interests include parallel computing, general-purpose computation on GPUs, physically based simulation, real-time rendering, and gastronomy. Mark earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003 and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame in 1998. He founded and maintains GPGPU.org, a website dedicated to general-purpose computation on GPUs. Mark lives in Brisbane, Australia. Thomas Hartley

Thomas Hartley is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer in computer games development at the University of Wolverhampton. He holds a BSc (Honors) in computer science. His research interests include artificial intelligence, online learning, and computer game development. Kevin He

[email protected] Kevin Kaichuan He is a senior programmer at Blizzard Entertainment, helping to build core technologies and infrastructure for various games. Lately, his interests have focused on the research and development of streaming for MMOs. Prior to joining Blizzard, Kevin was a graduate student, an engineer, a Linux kernel hacker, and lastly a software development manager in the field of Internet video streaming. He also was an author for Linux Journal and has one approved patent. Kevin received his master’s degree from Purdue University and his bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University, both in computer science. Claus Höfele

[email protected] Claus Höfele is a software engineer and writer. Throughout his career, he has specialized in software for devices that have constrained memory and processing power, such as game consoles, mobile phones, web browsers, PDAs, and smart cards. Claus is the author of Mobile 3D Graphics: Learning 3D Graphics with the Java Micro Edition (Course Technology PTR, 2007) and contributes regularly to websites, books, and conferences as a writer and speaker. He now works as an engine programmer at Team Bondi, an independent game developer based in Australia.

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Allen Hux

Allen Hux has worked on graphics-related technologies as a software engineer at Intel since 1998. During his tenure, he has worked on a wide variety of projects, including performance analysis tools, subdivision surfaces, shadow algorithms, the Shockwave 3D engine, surface reconstruction from photographs, a software rasterizer for D3D Mobile on XScale, and drivers for ultra-mobile and high-end graphics devices. Currently, he is devising various techniques to exploit the power of certain forthcoming dramatically parallel architectures, which will hopefully be widely available in the near future. In his rare free time, he likes to mountain bike, study archaeology, and spend time with his wife, their two dogs, and her horses. Peter Iliev

Peter Iliev is a software engineer at Visceral Games, an Electronic Arts studio, working as a gameplay engineer. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Virginia Tech. His game credits thus far include The Simpsons Game, Godfather II, and Dante’s Inferno. Matthew Jack

Matthew Jack first used a computer to write a story about a dog called Ben and then started coding games. His early forays into artificial intelligence included tic-tac-toe and draughts. He studied computer science at Churchill College, Cambridge, and spent many a happy night tinkering with homebrew graphics and simulations. After graduating, he worked for Luminova in Australia, performing research and development into image analysis and rendering. He then moved into the games industry, spending four years at Crytek in Germany. There, he developed for consoles and PC in the role of senior R&D AI programmer. He is now an indie developer and contractor. Aleksey Kadukin

Aleksey Kadukin is a software engineer at The Sims Division of Electronic Arts Inc., where he designs and develops tools and technologies for The Sims game projects. Before Electronic Arts, Aleksey worked as a software engineer at Sony Computer Entertainment America, Press Start, and Animatek. His published titles include The Sims 3, The Sims 2 Pets, The Sims 2 Glamour Life Stuff, The Sims 2 Sampler: Create-A-Sim for PC, and Jet Li: Rise to Honor for PS2. Aleksey earned a master’s degree in computer science from Moscow State University. Nikhil S. Ketkar

Nikhil S. Ketkar received his Ph.D. from Washington State University. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, and graph theory.

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Hyunwoo Ki

Hyunwoo Ki is currently a graphics engineer at the devCAT studio of Nexon Corporation in South Korea. He received a master’s degree in media engineering at Soongsil University and is interested in real-time lighting and shadowing for next-generation graphics engines. He is also a contributor to the ShaderX and GPU Pro books. Adam Lake

Adam Lake is a senior graphics architect in the Advanced Visual Computing Group, leading development of tools and technology for high-performance graphics hardware at Intel. Adam has held a number of positions during his 12+ years at Intel, including research in non-photorealistic rendering, delivering the Macromedia Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio and player, lead of the modern game technologies project, and optimizations of several game engines on IA. He has designed a stream programming architecture, which included the implementation of simulators, assemblers, compilers, and programming models. He has several publications and regularly reviews for ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE, and book chapters on computer graphics. He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Evansville and a master’s degree from UNC Chapel Hill. Michael Lewin

[email protected] Michael Lewin worked as a senior programmer at Sony Computer Entertainment from 2003 to 2008. He has a master’s degree in intelligent systems from the University of Sussex and specializes in artificial intelligence. Chris Lomont, Ph.D.

www.lomont.org Chris Lomont works as a research engineer at Cybernet Systems, working on projects as diverse as quantum computing algorithms, image processing for NASA, developing security hardware for Homeland Security, and computer forensics. Before that, he obtained a Ph.D. in math from Purdue and three bachelor’s degrees in physics, math, and computer science, worked as a game programmer, and did brief stints in financial modeling, robotics work, and various consulting roles. The rest of his time is spent hiking with his wife, watching movies, giving talks, doing recreational programming and math research, learning more physics, playing music, and performing various experiments. Visit his website www.lomont.org or his electronic gadget site www.hypnocube.com. Ricky Lung

Ricky Lung was born with a passion for science and engineering. He began to love programming and has taught himself in this field ever since he owned his first computer in 1998. He received his master’s degree in physics at The Hong Kong Polytechnic

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University in 2004, specializing in computational physics for nano-technology. Since then, he has worked in various game engine development projects. Currently, he is working at M-Inverse Holdings Ltd. as a senior software engineer, developing technology for next-generation platforms. Khaled Mamou

[email protected] Khaled Mamou received an engineering degree in computer science from the Tunisia Polytechnic School in 2004 and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics and computer science from the University of Paris V in 2008. He has been actively involved in the ISO/IEC Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) since 2005, especially focusing on 3D graphics compression. He significantly contributed to the standardization of the SC3DMC (Scalable Compression 3D Mesh Compression) and FAMC (Frame-Based Animated Mesh Compression) techniques for static and animated 3D mesh compression. In 2008, he joined Intel to work on collaborative 3D asset management system for video games. Dave Mark

Dave Mark is the president and lead designer of Intrinsic Algorithm, LLC, an independent game development studio and AI consulting company in Omaha, Nebraska. He is the author of the book Behavioral Mathematics for Game AI (Course Technology PTR, 2009) and is a contributor to the AI Game Programming Wisdom and Game Programming Gems book series. Dave is also a founding member of the AI Game Programmers Guild and has spoken at numerous industry conferences, including being the organizer and co-host of the Game Developers Conference AI Summit. He continues to further his education by attending the University of Life. He has no plans to graduate anytime soon. Quasim Mehdi

Professor Quasim Mehdi is a specialist in artificial intelligence, multimedia technology, and computer games design. He has published more than 120 papers at international conferences and journals. He is the founder and the general conference chair of the annual CGAMES Conference (www.cgames.org) on Intelligent Games and Simulation and International Conference on Computer Games: Artificial Intelligence, Design and Education (CGAIDE), which was sponsored by Microsoft, UK. He is also the chief editor of the first online International Journal on Intelligent Games & Simulation (IJIGS). His research focuses on the development of artificial intelligence and interaction among passive characters in immersive environments. Professor Mehdi is also interested in 3D story visualization systems that interpret natural language descriptions in order to generate corresponding virtual environments.

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Krzysztof Mieloszyk

[email protected] Krzysztof Mieloszyk is in the final stage of his Ph.D. in the real-time height performance computing at the University of Technology in Gdansk, where he also earned his master’s degree in computer multimedia techniques, specializing in the components of flight simulators. His academic interest and research focuses mainly on the problems of generating and rendering the terrain needed for physical real-time simulations and modeling the atmospheric phenomena by using fluid mechanics rules, as well as perfecting his Ph.D. thesis. Jason Mitchell

[email protected] Jason Mitchell is a software engineer at Valve, where he has worked on real-time 3D graphics techniques across a variety of projects over the past five years, including Team Fortress 2, Portal, the Left 4 Dead series, the Half-Life 2 episodes, as well as Valve’s animated shorts. Prior to joining Valve, Jason worked at ATI Research for eight years, where he led the 3D Application Research Group. Jason has published papers and articles on a variety of topics in real-time rendering and regularly speaks at graphics and game development conferences around the world. In addition to editing the graphics section of this book, he also served as a section editor for Game Programming Gems 5 and ShaderX 3. Jason’s publications and past talks can be found at www.pixelmaven.com/jason. Ben Nicholson

Ben Nicholson is a senior programmer at Rocksteady Studios. He received an M.A. (Oxon) in mathematical sciences from the University of Oxford, followed by a diploma in computer science from the University of Cambridge. He worked at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s London Studio before moving to Rocksteady Studios to work on physics and gameplay for Batman: Arkham Asylum. Ian Ni-Lewis

[email protected] Ian Ni-Lewis has been programming video games professionally since 1994. His early credits include the Great Battles series for Interactive Magic. More recently, he worked on the Xbox 360 as a member of the Advanced Technology Group, where he concentrated on audio and CPU performance tuning. He currently works for Google, where he is helping to implement a platform for high-performance software on the Internet.

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Mat Noguchi

Mat Noguchi is the senior engineering architect at Bungie. He came aboard back in December of 2000, tapped to tackle the unexpected and take on the in-game level editor for the critically acclaimed and totally awesome Halo: Combat Evolved. He then took ownership of the audio engine for the insanely popular Halo 2. Nowadays, you’ll find him hard at work on critical infrastructure systems, pondering top-secret unannounced projects, and raging at the moon. Mat’s credits include Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo 3: ODST. Borut Pfeifer

Borut Pfeifer is a freelance game designer and programmer. He’s worked at Electronic Arts, Sony Online Entertainment, Radical Entertainment, as well as his own startup. His published credits include Scarface: The World Is Yours (on PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC) and Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom (a launch title for the PlayStation 3). He has written articles on game programming for the Game Programming Gems series and the AI Game Programming Wisdom series. He has also taught technical game design at the Vancouver Film School. He currently blogs at www.plushapocalypse.com/borut. Brian Pickrell

Brian Pickrell has degrees in mathematics and aeronautical engineering. Before coming to game programming, he was an Air Force officer, a scientific satellite engineer, and a bush pilot on Kodiak Island. Most recently, he worked at Crystal Dynamics. He is currently unemployed and caring for a three-year-old son. Tomas Poch

Tomas Poch graduated in computer science from Charles University in Prague. During his studies, he participated on the IVE project. Currently, he is a Ph.D. candidate at Distributed Systems Research Group at Charles University, and his research is focused on formal methods in software development. Steve Rabin

[email protected] Steve Rabin is a principal software engineer at Nintendo of America, where he researches new techniques for Nintendo’s current and future platforms, architects development tools such as the Wii Profiler, and supports Nintendo developers. Before Nintendo, Steve worked primarily as an AI engineer at several Seattle start-ups, including Gas Powered Games, WizBang Software Productions, and Surreal Software. He organized and edited the AI Game Programming Wisdom series of books, the book Introduction to Game Development (Charles River Media, 2005), and has more than a dozen articles published in the Game Programming Gems series. He’s spoken at the AIIDE conference at Stanford, the Game Developers Conference, and numerous

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Nintendo development conferences in North America and Europe. He organized the two-day AI Summit at GDC 2009 and has moderated GDC AI roundtables. Steve also founded and manages the professional group known as the AI Game Programmers Guild, and he teaches artificial intelligence at both the University of Washington Extension and the DigiPen Institute of Technology. He earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering and a master’s degree in computer science, both from the University of Washington. Finally, Steve maintains a website that catalogs more than 1,000 game development articles at www.introgamedev.com. Mike Ramsey

Mike Ramsey is the principal programmer and scientist on the GLR Cognitive Engine. Mike has developed core technologies for the Xbox 360 and PC, including an egocentric motion management system for animal and agent navigation. He has also shipped a variety of games, including World of Zoo (PC and Wii), Men of Valor (Xbox and PC), Master of the Empire, several Zoo Tycoon 2 products, and other titles. Mike has contributed multiple gems to both the Game Programming and AI Wisdom series, as well as presented at the AIIDE conference at Stanford on uniform spatial representations. Mike has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from MSCD. Mike’s publications can be found at www.masterempire.com. He also has a forthcoming book entitled A Practical Cognitive Engine for AI. In his spare time, Mike enjoys playing bobbleheads, picking apples, and gathering acorns and pinecones with his fantastic daughter, Gwynn! B. Charles Rasco, Ph.D.

[email protected] B. Charles Rasco, Ph.D. is president of Smarter Than You Software, which he founded in 1999. Originally, he worked on Kalman filter design at the Boeing Company. He has created and ported many games for several game platforms over the years. Currently, he designs and creates simulations of neutrino and nuclear physics experiments. Also, he is working with the company ProGyr on a high-precision golf swing training device. João Lucas G. Raza

João Lucas G. Raza is co-founder and lead programmer for Brazilian casual game development company Versus Software. Before founding Versus Software, he partook in several game development competitions as team leader and lead designer, where eventually he won the Brazilian 2008 Game Jam. He holds a computer science degree from Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar). Aurelio Reis

Aurelio Reis is a programmer at id Software, where he works on graphics and special effects. Although he’s interested in all aspects of game development, he especially enjoys

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working on networking and gameplay, as well as doing research on cutting-edge graphics techniques. An industry veteran and avid gamer, Aurelio has contributed to numerous titles over the years but is most excited about the game he’s working on right now, Doom 4. Zhimin Ren

[email protected] Zhimin Ren is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her primary research interest is physics simulation, and she is currently working on physically based sound synthesis. She earned her bachelor’s degree in computer science from Zhejiang University in China. Marc Romankewicz

Marc Romankewicz works at AMD as part of the applications engineering team. He began his career in Germany, porting early versions of X Windows to industrial rackmount systems. After moving to the U.S., he joined Silicon Graphics, where he held a variety of engineering positions related to high-performance graphics. He enjoys creating code that performs at the limit of what the system can provide, especially when everyone else says it can’t be done. Dario Sancho

[email protected] After finishing his engineering degree in Spain, Dario Sancho worked as a software engineer at Siemens A.G., Austria. Then he moved to the U.K. to do a Ph.D. in electronic engineering at Loughborough University, where he worked on microprocessor design for real-time embedded control applications. He has spent a number of years in academia, doing research in various topics, such as robotics, biometric signal processing, AI, and multi-core design. Looking for a change, he moved to Cambridge to work on Ninja Theory’s title Heavenly Sword, becoming one of the main contributors to the AI system. Currently, he is working on the navigation system of Frontier’s title The Outsider. In his free time, he works on his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, plays guitar, and, together with his wife, Elena, enjoys rediscovering the world through the eyes of his two-year-old daughter, Mila. Rahul Sathe

Rahul Sathe works on interesting graphics algorithms and their hardware implications in the Advanced Visual Computing group at Intel. He received his bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering from Mumbai University in 1997 and received a master’s degree in computer engineering from Clemson University in 1999. He has published in the area of computer architecture, and his current interests include graphics architectures, geometry processing, and game physics.

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Brian Schmidt

[email protected] Brian Schmidt has been creating game music, sounds, and cutting-edge game sound technology since 1987 and has been in music technology since 1981. The 2008 recipient of the Game Audio Network Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award, he has a credit list of more than 130 games and a client list including Sony, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, QSound Labs, Capcom, Sega, Data East, Namco, SounDelux, and many others. Brian was the lead architect for the Xbox audio and music system, led development of the Xbox Audio Creation Tool, developed the XMA audio compression format, and was a finalist in the IGDA’s Best New Technology category. He is the founder and executive director of the GameSoundCon conference on video game music and sound design and is president of Brian Schmidt Studios, a music, sound design, and audio technology consulting firm. Brian has undergraduate degrees in music and computer science from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in computer applications in music. ˇ Šerý Ondrej

ˇ Šerý is one of the authors of the Intelligent Virtual Environment (IVE) frameOndrej work, which contains the prototype implementation of the LOD AI technique discussed in his article. He graduated in computer science in 2006. Currently, he is pursuing a Ph.D. in the field of program analysis and code model checking at Charles University in Prague. Simon Schirm

Simon Schirm earned a master’s degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), specializing in graphics and physically based animation. At the physics middleware company NovodeX, he managed projects ranging from scientific visualization to advertisement game applications. Once NovodeX was acquired by AGEIA Technologies, he led the Fluids feature team for the PhysX engine. Currently at NVIDIA, he is contributing to the development of the PhysX SDK, particularly the CUDA port of PhysX Particle Systems. Philip Taylor

[email protected] Philip Taylor has worked in the animation industry for eight years, starting in production working on BBC, National Geographic, and Animal Planet documentaries under the Natural History New Zealand documentary unit. After being nominated for an Emmy Award for animation in a series for Animal Planet, Phil went on to start up a software company to develop a character rigging and animation plug-in for 3ds Max called Character Animation Toolkit (CAT). When CAT was acquired by Softimage in 2006, Phil moved to Montreal, Canada, where he worked on XSI—in particular, the

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visual programming environment called ICE released in XSI 7.0. Now back in production, Phil holds the role of lead animation engineer at Trapdoor Inc. In the tactile world, Phil enjoys sport, travel, and people in general. If anyone is interested in the IK paper he presented or just saying hello, drop by his blog at motion-mechanic.blogspot.com. Richard Tonge

Richard Tonge is a senior software engineer in the PhysX group at NVIDIA, where he is the leader of the GPU Rigid Body Dynamics project. The PhysX group was formed in 2008 upon NVIDIA’s acquisition of AGEIA, where Richard worked for five years on the architecture and algorithms of the PPU, the first custom chip for accelerating games physics. Prior to AGEIA, he developed iterative Linear Complementarity Problem solvers for game physics at Mathengine. Richard holds a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in computation from the University of Oxford. Steven Tovey

Steven Tovey is a graphics programmer in the Core Technologies Team at Bizarre Creations, where he is currently chained to a PS3 working on Blur (and another couple of unannounced titles). Prior to joining the Bizarre crew, Ste enjoyed stints at both Juice Games and Slitherine Software, where he worked on a bunch of different stuff, some of which glimpsed the light of day and some of which did not. He regrettably holds a first-class honors degree in computer games technology, which basically means he’s stuck doing this forever. While he loves to hack about with Sony hardware, Ste does occasionally have to do something else. Over the years, “something else” has included going on tour playing drums in a hardcore band, messing about with hardware design, maintaining his blog, playing the British champion at chess, and climbing Fuji-san equipped only with cans of Chuhai Strong and Snake’s old favorite, Calorie Mate. Gabriel Ware

Gabriel Ware joined the games industry in 2004 as an engineer working on Top Spin for the PlayStation 2. Since then, he has worked on a variety of engines, pipelines, and hardware architectures. He has experience in network, animation, and low-level programming as well as developing tools, scripts, and code optimization. Gabriel encourages collaborative work as well as iterative and agile software development. He is also a professional trainer, having run several master classes. Ben Wyatt

Ben Wyatt is the technical director at Rocksteady Studios. He received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. He worked as a lead programmer at Argonaut Games, working on several games including Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone on PlayStation. In 2004, he joined Rocksteady Studios as a founding member, most recently completing Batman: Arkham Asylum for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3.

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Contributor Biographies

G. Michael Youngblood

G. Michael Youngblood, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, co-director of the Games + Learning Lab (playground.uncc.edu), and head of the Game Intelligence Group (gameintelligencegroup.org). His work studies how artificial agents and real people interact in virtual environments, including computer games and high-fidelity simulations, in order to understand the elements and patterns of learning for the development of better artificial agents. He has worked with real-time computer games, intelligent environments, and robotics since 1997. His research interests include interactive AI, game knowledge and information structures, and machine and human learning in games. Jason Zink

Jason Zink is an electrical engineer currently working in the automotive industry. He has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and by the time you read this, he will have completed his master’s degree in computer science. He also recently received an MVP award from Microsoft for XNA/DirectX. He has contributed to the ShaderX series and the GameDev.net collection series of books, and he co-authored the free online D3D10 book Programming Vertex, Geometry, and Pixel Shaders, as well as publishing several online computer graphics–related articles. In his free time, Jason enjoys spending time with his wife and two children, working on his rendering engine, and finding new ways to apply rendering hardware and algorithms to new problems. You can usually find him on the GameDev.net forums as Jason Z, where he also maintains a regularly updated developer journal. Robert Zubek

Dr. Robert Zubek is a senior software engineer at Zynga in San Francisco, developing games for social networks. Prior to Zynga, he was at Three Rings Design and Electronic Arts/Maxis; even earlier, he did research in artificial intelligence and robotics. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Northwestern University, where he also earned his other CS degrees.