from poly.edu:

More than 50 NYU-Poly faculty members and students were on hand to inspire and amaze the crowd, which included 13-year-old Isaac Solomon, an enthusiastic budding scientist who was able to take an attempt at creating an augmented-reality Death Star and controlling a flying drone, among other exciting activities. “It’s awesome what you can do just by pushing a button,” he said. “I might have to consider becoming an engineer, because it seems like they get to work on really cool things all day.”

Everyone at NYU-Poly would agree with that assertion; in fact, Professor Katherine Isbister, who holds a joint appointment in the Computer Science Department at NYU-Poly and the NYU Game Center, was one of the featured speakers at the WSF’s aptly named panel “Cool Jobs.”
Besides Isbister, other NYU-Poly departments and programs took center stage, including Mark Skwarek, the creator of the app that allowed for the creation of that Death Star; Maurizio Porfiri, whose robotic fish attracted virtually every pint-sized visitor to Innovation Square; and Jin Montclare, whose Lewis Dots app makes learning chemistry fun.

Festival-goers also enjoyed a rare opportunity to visit NYU-Poly’s Game Innovation Lab to check out games that have not even hit the market yet. And if that wasn’t enough gaming, the Square was also the site of a massive contest featuring YaMove!, a  dance-battle game that uses technology to augment face-to-face dancing.

For more information and media:

http://worldsciencefestival.com/events/cool_jobs2013

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pixelmotiongame/

Indie Tech Talk 01 : Scott Anderson

Scott Anderson, creator of Shadow Physics, spoke about using technology for gameplay innovations, specifically signed distance fields.

Indie Tech Talk 02 : Kaho Abe

Kaho Abe is currently the Artist in Residence at the Game Innovation Lab at NYU Poly, where she researches and builds games that utilize technology to bring people together face to face.

Indie Tech Talk 03 : Kevin Cancienne - Punks Not Thre3D: A Pragmatic Approach to Indie Technology 

Kevin talks about his work, why he thinks it might be time for a 3D revolution in the indie scene, and the benefits of being a mediocre programmer.

Indie Tech Talk 04 : Ivan Safrin – Engines, Frameworks and the means of Production

Ivan Safrin takes a look at the motivation behind writing a cross-platform development framework from scratch, discusses why open source tools are key to the future of independent game development and attempts to answer once and for all if it's a really good or a really terrible idea to spend years reinventing the wheel.

Indie Tech Talk 05 : Cindy Poremba 

Cindy Poremba is a digital media researcher, artist and curator, exploring the intersection of documentary, videogames and interactive art. She is interested in the intersection between creation practices and technology– specifically how meaning is read through digital technologies. Her research explores documentary in videogames and digital media, art and independent videogames (particularly the new arcade movement), emerging artistic/cultural practice related to photography, videogames and robotic technologies, and research-creation methodology in interactive art and design. 

Indie Tech Talk 06 was cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy

Indie Tech Talk 07 : Noah Sasso – Building Barabariball and Beyond

Brooklyn-based game developer and musician Noah Sasso discusses the interesting challenges that come with building and tuning a competitive multiplayer fighting game, as compared to the other types of games he has worked on. He also demonstrates the effects of tuning by modifying the source code live, and discusses how his musical background has influenced his approach to game development.

Indie Tech Talk 08 : Zach Gage – Conceptual Art as Technical Practice

Zach Gage is a game designer, programmer, educator, and conceptual artist from New York City. His work often explores the power of systems, both those created by social interaction in digital spaces, and those that can be created for others, through the framing of games.

Indie Tech Talk 09 : Dona Bailey – Centipede +30

Game developer and educator Dona Bailey discusses how she created the classic arcade game Centipede at Atari in the early 80's, how she came to leave the company afterwards, and how these experiences have informed her thoughts on education and technology.

Indie Tech Talk 10:  Don Miller

Don Miller discusses the 6502, the 8-bit microprocessor responsible for your fondest childhood memories: the Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, and Apple IIe. More than just a tech talk, he will covers the beauty of Assembly Language programming and why having a low-level understanding of hardware is awesome.

About the speaker:

DON MILLER is an artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. He performs live visuals in real time under the alias NO CARRIER. Miller works with nearly obsolete repurposed electronics to create psychedelic low resolution video art. Part of the 8bitpeoples artist collective, he performs, exhibits, and lectures worldwide. He is a graduate of NYU's ITP program and works as a Learning Designer at the Institute of Play.

Indie Ted Talk 10 with Don Miller from Vici Shaweddy on Vimeo.

"Industry veteran Dona Bailey paid a visit to NYU-Poly's Game Innovation Lab recently to talk about her experience in Atari's coin-op division in the early 1980s, where she co-developed Centipede along with Ed Logg in 1981."

Click here to read the full article.

Bailey was modest about her days at Atari, as one of only a few hundred assembly language programmers in the US, and recalled her introduction, at a local bar, to the first arcade cabinet she got her hands on, an experience which would influence her career move into game programming. As the only women on her team by the time she left Atari a couple years later, Bailey had already established herself as an important figure in early video game design history, pioneering the use of a rollerball controller as an alternative to the joystick (typical at the time) due to her own preferences as a designer and tester of the games she worked on. 

After talking a bit about her turn to gaming from the automotive industry, she demonstrated the simple plotting method used to create the spiders that appeared in perhaps her most famous Atari title "Centipede." Drafted from simple colored squares placed on graph paper, Bailey noted that her real passion was in the visual side of game creation and described the pleasure of seeing her work comes to life on the screen, a passion she continues to persue today as an academic and filmmaker. 

Speaker: 

Dona Bailey was the software engineer on the Atari design team that made the arcade game Centipede in 1981.  After leaving Atari in 1982, Bailey worked briefly for Videa, a game design company later known as Sente, and for Activision.  In 1985, Bailey left the video game industry to work in other areas of computer programming and academic research.

Today, Dona Bailey teaches on the faculty of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, where she teaches writing for new media and pursues a goal of creating documentary videos. 

From the Wall Street Journal:

Downtown Brooklyn, which has been struggling to attract more hip technology companies, has lured a new tenant that arguably epitomizes the nerdy-cool image it wants to project—a videogame institute.

New York University is launching an interdisciplinary center to train budding game makers in the design, coding and artistic theory of the rapidly growing game industry, which has expanded to include mobile apps and even promotions for TV shows and films.

Read more at: Videogame On—in Brooklyn – WSJ.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Students aspiring to create the next blockbuster video game get an extra boost at Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) and New York University, according to the Princeton Review. Both were named as top places to study video game design in the Review’s 2011-2012 survey of 150 institutions offering undergraduate and graduate coursework and degrees in the United States and Canada.

Read more here : http://www.poly.edu/news/2012/04/24/nyu-poly-named-top-place-study-video-game-design

——–
Abstract:

Video games provide an excellent environment for artificial
intelligence (AI) research, because they present many real-world
properties. One of the key challenges is developing AI systems capable
of intelligently interacting with human participants. Building game AI
which engages with players invokes the following questions: what
gameplay behavior can be learned from players, and what player
behavior can be predicted based on previous gameplay interactions?  I
will present two projects which have explored these research
questions. The first project, EISBot, extracts examples from game
replays to learn how to play StarCraft from demonstration. The second
project, Madden NFL Mining, creates models of player retention by
building regression models from millions of players.  The outcomes of
these projects are techniques for building game AI which learns from
demonstration, and approaches for modeling player behavior in games.
The broader impact of this work is methods for integrating learning in
game AI, and incorporating player feedback in the game design process.

——–
Bio:

Ben Weber is a Ph.D. candidate working with Michael Mateas and Arnav
Jhala in the Expressive Intelligence Studio at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. His dissertation project, EISBot, incorporates
reactive planning, case-based reasoning, and machine learning to play
the real-time strategy game StarCraft. To promote research in game AI,
Ben organized the first AIIDE StarCraft AI Competition, which
attracted participants from all over the world. Ben previously worked
at Electronic Arts as a technical analyst on Madden NFL 12.