Confirmed Speakers as of June 8, 2015. More speakers and discussion panel membership to be announced soon!
Peter was born in Guildford, Surrey and has established an international reputation for pioneering video games development. He has founded several Guildford-based video games studios including Bullfrog Productions, Lionhead Studios and most recently 22Cans has led to numerous worldwide games successes. He was awarded a BAFTA fellowship at the 2011 Academy Awards and the OBE in the Queen's 2014 New Year's honours list.
Chris Clifton
Chris is the Chief Technology Officer and Divisional Director for Europe based Sony Semiconductor and Electronic Solutions (SES) with responsibilities for new technology/product incubation and telecommunication/semiconductor R&D activities. His main mission is to identify and help accelerate the development of core enabling technologies which will underpin future consumer and industrial electronic products. Current research focus areas include 3GPP related technologies which will pave the way towards the 5G era including the wireless M2M connectivity technologies which will underpin the next IoT revolution.
Dr John Collomosse is a Senior Lecturer within CVSSP, joining Surrey from the University of Bath where he also completed his Ph.D. in Computer Vision and Graphics (2004). John has spent periods of time in commercial R&D, working for IBM UK Labs (Hursley), Vodafone R&D (Munich), Hewlett Packard Labs (Bristol); the latter under a Royal Academy of Engineering fellowship. He is a member of the EPSRC college, and is a Chartered Engineer (CEng). John's research focuses on video based animation techniques, including artistic stylization of video and 4D character animation using surface reconstruction from multi-viewpoint video. Current project of relevance to the video games industry include EU FP7 RE@CT project focusing on markerless 4D capture of interactive games characters. He is co-investigator on the InnovateUK REFRAME project exploring new technology real-time markerless performance capture and on-set pre-visualization. John also has extensive track record in visual search technologies exploring large-scale image and video search for dance performance, visual plaigiarism detection, and sketch based image and video search.
James has spent the past 13 years of his career at Epic leading programming efforts across the studio’s games and game engine technology. James has been intimately involved in architecting several areas of Unreal Engine 4, including the gameplay framework, animation, physics, and Blueprint visual scripting system. He now resides in his native England where he works alongside the fine chaps in the Guildford office at Epic Games UK.
Prof. Adrian Hilton is Director of the Centre for VIsion Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) at the University of Surrey. CVSSP is one of the largest UK research groups in computer vision, pattern recognition, signal processing and multimedia communication with over 100 researchers and a grant portfolio in excess of £9M. The goal of Adrian's research is to bridge-the-gap between real and computer generated imagery. His research combines the fields of computer vision, graphics and animation to investigate new methods for reconstruction, modelling and understanding of the real world from images and video. From 2008-12 Adrian was supported by a Royal Society Industry Fellowship to conduct research with leading visual-effects company Framestore investigating 4D technologies for Digital Doubles in film production.
Rich narrowly avoided a law degree to become CTO of the Imaginarium. He holds awards in Computer Science and Electronic Imaging, and has been involved in the field of Motion Capture for over ten years. Rich has encountered such diverse challenges as operating in an academic support role; Commercialization and marketing of MoCap services; Undertaking high-volume and complex location capture for video games; and devising and implementing the advanced Performance Capture facilities of the Imaginarium at Ealing Studios. Rich is leading the Imaginarium's Research and Development group, which has been the recipient of Trade Strategy Board (now innovateUK) 'SMART' and 'Creative Collaboration' grant funds.
Nick is an Employment Law specialist advising on complex employment documentation, giving strategic advice on reorganisation programmes and business transfers and has conducted cases involving discrimination, whistle blowing and TUPE to name but a few. Nick is a prolific contributor to newspapers and journals, regularly lectures on employment law issues and has contributed chapters to a number of books. He is a non-executive Director of the City HR Association and is on the Management Board of Devonshire House Network. He has a large number of clients in the technology, media and telecoms industry and as such has a wide spectrum of experience in this area.
Dr Philip Jackson is Senior Lecturer in speech and audio processing at CVSSP which he joined as Lecturer in November 2002, with MA in Engineering (Cambridge University, UK) and PhD in Electronic Engineering (University of Southampton, UK). Together with Dr Wenwu Wang in CVSSP, he leads the Machine Audition Group of a dozen research fellows and students. His research in audio and speech processing has contributed to projects (e.g., BALTHASAR, DANSA, Dynamic Faces, QESTRAL, UDRC and POSZ) in active noise control for aircraft, acoustics of speech production, source separation for automatic speech recognition (ASR), use of articulatory models for ASR, audio-visual processing for speech enhancement and visual speech synthesis, and spatial aspects of subjective sound quality evaluation.
Prof. Tony Myatt is the Subject Leader in Sound Recording and Deputy Head of the School of Arts. His research and teaching focus on contemporary aesthetics in electronic and computer music; spatial sound reproduction and recording; the composition and performance of computer music and contemporary audio art. In addition to reesearch and teaching activities, Tony also works closely with a number of independent electronic music artists to realise audio, installation and art works. He was the principle investigator of the Art and Humanities Research Council's (UK) New Aesthetics in Computer Music Project, which documented and investigated changing practices, philosophies and aesthetics in independent electronic music since 1995.
Phil Rogers
Sony Computer Entertainment - bio coming soon.
Jaclyn is a commercial lawyer with a particular focus on IT and technology related agreements, and has considerable experience advising and representing a large cross-section of companies within the computer games industry ranging from start-up developers to large global publishers. She provides advice on software development, licensing, publishing, hosting, support and maintenance agreements as well as general commercial agreements and associated issues including data protection, consumer and e-commerce legislation.
Kirk Woolford initially studied Computer Science before discovering digital photography experiments in the mid 80s, and interactive media in the 90s. He has spent more than 25 years balancing academia, industry, and cultural institutions. Kirk has taught in Design, Media Arts, Fine Art, and Choreography programs in Germany, Holland, the US and UK. He has set up a Digital Fine Arts strand at Lancaster University, a Creative Media Practice Programme at the University of Sussex, and joined the University of Surrey in 2013 to set up the new Digital Media Arts Programme. Before accepting his first full-time academic post, Kirk worked as a technical director with companies including Channel Four, FilmFour, BBC, The Economist Group, Babel Media, and THQ. Kirk has nearly 20 years experience working with magnetic, ultrasonic, optical, and inertial motion capture systems.