COSIGN

Keynote Speakers

ERNEST ADAMS

Ernest Adams has over 14 years of experience in the computer games industry and has been employed at a senior level by both Electronic Arts and Bullfrog Productions. He currently works as a game design and production consultant, working independently and as a member of the International Hobo game design consortium. Recent work has included acting as a consultant to Guinness World Records and Ragdoll, originators of the Teletubbies.

He is the author of the books "Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design" (with Andrew Rollings) and "Break into the Game Industry: How to Get a Job Making Video Games,". He has also been employed since 1997 to write the monthly "The Designer's Notebook" column for the games industry website, Gamasutra.

Ernest Adams was the founder and first president of the International Game Developers' Association and former director of the Game Developers' Conference.

MARC CAVAZZA

Dr Marc Cavazza is best known for his research on Interactive Storytelling and Conversational Characters. The Interactive Storytelling research he supervises at Teesside is developing a character-based approach in which the user influences the story mainly from a spectator's position. In the field of human-computer dialogue, he has been co-ordinator of the Virtual Interactive Presenter's project, developing a conversational interface for Interactive Television and is a member of SIGDIAL, the special interest group of the Association for Computational Linguistics on human-computer dialogue.

LEV MANOVICH

Lev Manovich is an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department, University of California, San Diego where he teaches courses in new media art and theory. He has been working with computer media as an artist, computer animator, designer, and programmer since 1984. His art projects include: little movies, the first digital film project designed for the Web (1994); Freud-Lissitzky Navigator, a conceptual software for navigating twentieth century history; Anna and Andy, a Web adaptation of Anna Karenina; and a digital film project Soft Cinema commissioned for ZKM exhibition Future Cinema (2002-2003). He is the author of The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001), Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual Culture (Chicago University Press, 1993) and over 50 articles. Currently he is working on a new book, Info-aesthetics.