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Youngmoo Kim is Director of the ExCITe Center at Drexel University, an institute at for transdisciplinary collaboration, and Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering. His research group, the Music & Entertainment Technology Laboratory (MET-lab), pursues AI for music, human-machine interfaces and robotics for expressive interaction, and STEAM education. He has also served as Resident Technologist for Opera Philadelphia and is an advisor for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was a member of the National Academies committee for “Branches from the Same Tree”, a 2018 report on the integration of the Humanities & Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education.

Youngmoo also has extensive experience in vocal music performance, including performances with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and SpeakEasy Stage Company (Boston) and currently sings with The Tonics, an a cappella ensemble in Philadelphia. In response to the coronavirus pandemic, he developed Virtual Chorister, a smartphone app for remote music collaboration, and launched “Creating at a Distance”, a newsletter highlighting creative & collaborative work in the era of social distancing.

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Heidi Boisvert is an interdisciplinary artist, experience designer, creative technologist and academic researcher who interrogates the neurobiological and socio-cultural effects of media and technology. Simply put, she studies the role of the body, the senses and emotion in human perception and social change. Boisvert is currently mapping the world’s first media genome, while taking great care with its far-reaching ethical implications. She founded futurePerfect lab, a creative agency and think-tank that works with social justice organizations to design playful emerging media campaigns to transform the public imagination. She also co-founded XTH, a company creating novel modes of expression through biotechnology and the human body. Presently, she is working with David Byrne on Theater of the Mind, a new immersive theater piece and co-curating EdgeCut, a live performance series.

Boisvert, who holds a Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is an Assistant Professor of AI and the Arts within the School of Theatre + Dance at the University of Florida. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Norman Lear Center (based at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication), a research affiliate in the Open Documentary Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of NEW INC, the cultural incubator at The New Museum of Contemporary Art. She serves on the advisory board of American Documentary POV Spark and was selected by ZERO1 and the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to represent the United States in Turkey.

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Refik Anadol is a media artist, director and designer born in Istanbul, Turkey.  Currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He works in live audio/visual performance, site-specific immersive installation and parametric sculpture, particularly creating a hybrid relationship between architecture and media arts.  He holds an MFA from University of California, Los Angeles in Media Arts, an MFA from Istanbul Bilgi University in Visual Communication Design, and BA in Photography and Video.

Refik is the recipient of a number of awards, including Microsoft Research’s Best Vision Award, German Design Award, UCLA Art+Architecture Moss Award, University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Award, SEGD Global Design Awards and Google’s Art and Machine Intelligence Artist Residency Award.  His site-specific audio/visual performances have been seen in Walt Disney Concert Hall (USA), Hammer Museum (USA), International Digital Arts Biennial Montreal (Canada), Ars Electronica Festival (Austria), l’Usine | Genève (Switzerland), Arc De Triomf (Spain), Zollverein | SANAA’s School of Design Building (Germany), santralistanbul Contemporary Art Center (Turkey), Outdoor Vision Festival SantaFe New Mexico (USA), Istanbul Design Biennial (Turkey), Sydney City Art (Australia), Lichtrouten (Germany).

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Mark Guzdial is a Professor in Computer Science & Engineering and Engineering Education Research at the University of Michigan. He studies how people come to understand computing and how to make that more effective. He is one of the founders of the International Computing Education Research (ICER) conference.  He was one of the leads on the NSF alliance “Expanding Computing Education Pathways” which helped US states improve and broaden their computing education. He invented and has written several books on the “Media Computation” contextualized approach to computing education. With his wife and colleague, Barbara Ericson, he received the 2010 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator award.

Mark is an ACM Distinguished Educator and a Fellow of the ACM. His most recent book is Learner-Centered Design of Computing Education: Research on Computing for Everyone (Morgan & Claypool, 2015). He received the 2019 ACM SIGCSE Outstanding Contributions to Education award.

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Maria Hwang is a professor of Computer Science at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in the Math and Science department. Her research focuses on delivering fashion, health, and wellness content through persuasive, personalized, and playful human-centered interfaces.  Courses she teaches include “Statistics, Machine Learning, and Data Mining,” “Programming and Mobile Apps,” “Statistical Analysis,” and “Basic Mathematics.”

Prior to joining FIT Maria was a post-doctoral researcher at the Columbia University Medical Center’s (CUMC) Biomedical Informatics Department working with Lena Mamykina. Maria received her doctorate of education (Ed.D.) at Teachers College, Columbia University in Instructional Technology and Media under the supervision of Charles Kinzer, focusing on persuasive messages for behavior change in a digital game environment. She continues her research on different persuasive and motivational strategies in gaming environments for healthful behavior and chronic disease management. She is also developing courses and modules that are geared towards non-computer science (CS) major students that can aid them in their career with the basic CS literacy and skills. She is hoping to create a CS minor at FIT through writing and developing more courses that are rigorous but also flexible for those coming in with no prior CS knowledge.

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Theo Watson is Partner & Creative Director at Design I/O. He is an artist, designer and experimenter whose work is born out of the curiosity and excitement of designing experiences that come alive and invite people to play. Theodore’s work ranges from creating new tools for artistic expression, experimental musical systems, to immersive, interactive environments with full-body interaction. His recent work includes The Eyewriter, an eye controlled drawing tool, Graffiti Research Lab’s Laser Tag, laser graffiti system and Funky Forest, an immersive interactive ecosystem for young children. Theodore works together with Zachary Lieberman and Arturo Castro on openFrameworks, which is an open source library for writing creative code in C++.

Emily Gobeille is is Partner & Creative Director at Design I/O. She is an artist and award-winning designer who specializes in merging technology and design to create rich immersive design experiences. Working in concept development, visual design, interaction design and creative direction, her experience over the past eighteen years spans many disciplines, including web, print, motion graphics, games and installations. Emily’s unbound energy and affinity for telling stories lends to her playful approach to projects. With an emphasis on meaningful interaction and systems built to support open play and discovery, her work creates a sense of wonder and delight.