HRI Infrastructure Project

HRI Infrastructure Project (Demo)
Robert Nideffer, Director of the Game Culture and Technology Lab
Walt Scacchi, Acting Director of the Institute for Software Research and Associate Director of the Game Culture & technology Lab
Yuzo Kanomata, ISR
Biography:
Robert F. Nideffer researches, teaches, and publishes in the areas of virtual environments and behavior, interface theory and design, technology and culture, and contemporary social theory. He holds an MFA in Computer Arts, and a Ph.D. in Sociology, and is an Associate Professor in Studio Art and Informatics at UC Irvine, where he serves as an Affiliated Faculty in the Visual Studies Program, and as Co-Director for the Art, Computation and Engineering (ACE) Program. He is also directing the UC Irvine Game Culture & Technology Lab, and a related academic "Concentration in Game Culture and Technology." Robert has participated in a number of national and international online and offline exhibitions, speaking engagements and panels for a variety of professional conferences.Between 1997 and 1999, Robert was employed by the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara where he led the User Interface Design and Implementation group of the Alexandria Digital Library project. While there he was responsible for developing distributed, peer-to-peer digital library architectures and production-ready software components supporting organization, publication, discovery, and use of geospatial and other types of strongly structured scientific data.
Biography:
Walt Scacchi is acting Director, senior research scientist and research faculty member in the Institute for Software Research. He is also the associate director for research at the Computer Game Culture and Technology Laboratory, both at UC Irvine. He received a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science at University of California, Irvine in 1981. On joining the faculty at the University of Southern California in 1981, he created and directed the USC System Factory Project until 1991.This was the first software factory research project in a U.S. university. During the 1990's, Dr. Scacchi founded and directed the USC ATRIUM Laboratory, focused on investigating the organizational and technological processes of system development, with emphasis on software engineering and electronic commerce. Dr. Scacchi left USC and returned to UC Irvine in 1999. His research interests include open source software development, computer game culture and technology, knowledge-based systems for modeling and simulating complex engineering and business processes, developing decentralized heterogeneous information systems, software acquisition and electronic commerce/business, and organizational analysis of system development projects. Dr. Scacchi is a member of ACM, IEEE, AAAI, and the Software Process Association (SPA). He is an active researcher with more than 100 research publications. He has directed 45 externally funded research projects. He also has had numerous consulting and visiting scientist positions.