People

Yusuf Pisan is an international expert on computer game design and development. He is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney, where he runs the Games Studio and co-directs the Creativity and Cognition Studios.

Yusuf is one of the founders of the Sydney Chapter of ACM Special Interest Group on Graphics (SIGGRAPH) and the founder of the first Interactive Entertainment conference in Australia, which is now established as an annual conference series. He has coordinated the International Game Developers Association's (IGDA) task force to design a model curriculum for games in 2007 and is the proposed chair for the SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 bid. Yusuf introduced the first advanced subjects on computer games in Australia, designed the Bsc in Games Development at UTS, and serves as the Faculty of IT representative to oversee the Master of Animation course.

Aram Dulyan joined CCS in 2007, having obtained his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 2006 from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA, USA. His background is primarily in computer graphics, however his current research centres around audio and accessibility.

The research attempts to facilitate the creation of audio tours accessible by the blind. Specifically, it focuses on the context of cultural sites such as museums and galleries, and representing such environments using sound. The semantics of object relationships within a real-life environment and the generation of natural language narration aids is another major aspect of the research.

Damian Hills is a multimedia developer with over 10 years industry experience. He has worked on a wide range of projects for industries including medicine, education, government, film, and games, in Australia, US and Europe. After completing a Graduate Diploma in Advanced Computing at UTS in 2006, Damian joined CCS as a PhD student in 2008 to research interactive narrative and storytelling systems and how they can be applied to conversational systems of a multimodal collaborative nature.

Drawing on such diverse fields such as narratology, cybernetics, and multimodal interaction, this research aims to investigate a model for how multimodal interface and conversational information systems can assist in the production of meaning and sense-making for collaborative storytelling applications. A key component is the development and evaluation of a storytelling system, assimilate.net. This project is a collaborative environment that allows participants to visually construct narratives in an abstract virtual space. The system consists of a visual search engine that semantically aligns the participant’s search criteria with template stories drawn from a database of mythology and folklore. By use of a novel interface, participants develop the notion of a constructed ‘closed world’ that forms coherence and collective sense-making, while glimpses of chaotic patterns may be seen outside.

This research is funded by Australasian Center for Interaction Design (ACID) as a part of the 'Our Content' project which aims to develop a reusable framework for generative content systems.

Daniel is working towards his master degree at UTS after graduating in Computer Science in São Paulo, Brazil.

At the Games Studio, he initially worked in the Diamond Touch Table project and is currently working in his research, a musical serious game.

During his master (by coursework) course, he focused on programming, graphics and multimedia in order to improve his game development skills. He also included a final research project that is under development at the Games Studio.

Greg is currently studying a Bachelor of Science in IT at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). He is majoring in Business Information Systems , while sub majoring in Enterprise System Development and Computer Graphics and Animation.

Greg joined CCS and the Games Studio as a volunteer in 2008. In the Games Studio he aided the development of “Ball Fight”, a game made for the research and development of touch screen technology for games along with Daniel Roperto. In 2009 he is currently learning Unreal Engine 3.0 and Maya, with aims of creating a "Robot Tragedy" machinima as his next UTS Games Studio project.

Greg likes to hang out with friends and family when not at university or work. He also likes to watch all different sorts of movies, read numerous books ranging from graphic novels to Japanese literature, watch pop culture documentaries, listen to all genres of music and of course play video games.

Jeremy Epstein is a recent graduate of UTS, having completed his undergrad BIT course in 2006. He has been working in the web development industry for the past 3 years, and is a specialist in the Drupal open-source content management system. Jeremy has a strong commitment to the international Drupal developer community, and he is one of the founders of the Sydney Drupal Users Group. He has worked as a consultant for companies in a variety of sectors, including engineering, publishing, not-for-profit, and web services.

Jeremy joined CCS in 2008, in order to undertake one year of focused Honours research. The research is concerned with sketch recognition, in the field of simple childrens' drawings, and with a view to applications in gaming and in education. Jeremy has Yusuf Pisan as his supervisor for this project.

Jeremy enjoys cycling, skiing, reading trashy novels, writing on his blog, playing mindless PC games, and mucking around with web designs. For 12 months during 2007, he took an extended vacation and went backpacking around the world. For half of this trip, he was in South America, where he learned to speak (what he claims is) half-decent Spanish, and where he was involved in a volunteer work program. As a general rule, he sleeps all morning unless forced to do otherwise.

Julien has a background in Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction. He graduated in 2004 with a Masters degree in HCI in Toulouse, France. He then worked for one year at CSIRO-ICT Centre in Sydney, and participated in research in Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Julien has a strong interest in music as he practised the clarinet for more than 10 years and more recently the guitar and the keyboards. He has played in symphonic and brass & wind orchestras, and has also been composing orchestral and electronic music.

Julien is currently undertaking a PhD at the Creativity and Cognition Studios joining his passion for music to his career in IT and research. His PhD work focuses on designing software solutions to facilitate creative communication between film composers and filmmakers.

Julien has also been granted scholarships from ACID (Australasian CRC for Interaction Design), the Regional Council and the University of La Reunion (France).

Viveka Weiley is an interaction designer with a background in Virtual Environments. He joined CCS in September 2006 to begin research into tools for distributed creative collaboration in mixed real/virtual environments.
Viveka holds a Bachelor of Design from UNSW CoFA, and a Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Information Technology from UTS, with First Class Honours and the University Medal. He is past chair of Sydney ACM SIGGRAPH, current chair of ANZGRAPH, and was a member of the formation commitee for the upcoming SIGGRAPH ASIA conference series. He is currently English Review Service coordinator for SIGGRAPH ASIA 2008 and a jury member for SIGGRAPH 2008.
He has spent ten years in industry, working primarily in telepresence and online communities. In 2002 he co-founded a company, Ping, to build an interactive online virtual earth. The project attracted funding from the Telstra Broadband Fund and clients including the City of Sydney, UNSW and the NSW Department of Housing. It is now part of the US National Science Foundation funded X3D Earth project. 
Viveka commenced his Ph.D. studies in 2008, focusing on the development of design principles to support creative collaboration within distributed teams in virtual environments (VEs). Existing VEs have solved many engineering problems, but significant design and human factors problems remain. In particular, the transformation from space for interaction to dynamic place for creative collaboration on real-world tasks is unsolved. While the effect of place on behaviour is well understood in the fields of architecture and social geography, it has received less attention in the development of VEs. Viveka’s research seeks to explore our understanding of the design of real collaborative places, in order to discover what is applicable to the virtual.