Jim Bizzocchi

Role: Senior Researcher, Shared and Collaborative Environments

Jim Bizzocchi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. His interests include the aesthetics of New Media design, the development of models for interactive narrative, the emergent poetics implicit in the use of large-scale, high-definition video panels, and the relationship of game design and learning outcomes. His research has involved the analysis and design of interface environments that support narrative experience, determining the effect of high-definition large-screen video display on the dynamics of story experience, and understanding the role of story in the experience and the design of simulation environments.

Jonathan M. Borwein

Role: Team Leader, Advanced Visualization and Simulation

Jonathan M. Borwein was Shrum Professor of Science (1993-2003) and a Canada Research Chair in Information Technology (2001-08) at Simon Fraser University, and was founding Director of the Centre for Experimental and Constructive Mathematics. In 2004, he (re)joined the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie as a Canada Research Chair in Distributed and Collaborative Research, cross-appointed in Mathematics, while preserving an adjunct appointment at Simon Fraser.

He was born in St Andrews in 1951, and received his DPhil from Oxford in 1974, as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to joining SFU in 1993, he worked at Dalhousie (1974-91), CarnegieMellon (1980-82) and Waterloo (1991-93). He has received various awards including the Chauvenet Prize (93), Fellowship in the Royal Society of Canada (94), Fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (02), an honorary degree from Limoges (99), and foreign membership in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (03).

Dr. Borwein is Canadian Governor of the MAA (2004--07), a past President of the  Canadian Mathematical Society (2000-02) and past Chair of (the National Science Library)  NRC-CISTI's Advisory Board. He is Member at Large of the WestGrid Executive  (www.westgrid.ca) and chairs the International Math Union's Committee on Electronic  Information and Communications (www.ceic.math.ca, 2002-2006). His interests span pure
(analysis), applied (optimization), computational (numerical and computational analysis)  mathematics, and high performance computing. He has authored ten books (most recently  two on Experimental Mathematics (www.expmath.info) and over 250 journal articles, and is  co-founder (1994) of a software company, MathResources (www.mathresources.com),  producing highly interactive CD and Network tools primarily for school and university  mathematics.

Pierre Boulanger

Role: Team Leader, Shared and Collaborative Environments

Pierre Boulanger, PhD, Professor, TRLabs adjunct scientist, Director of the Advanced ManMachine Interface Laboratory is an expert in Computer Vision, Virtualized Reality Systems and Sensor Based Geometric Modeling. He has lengthy experience in VR applications, both from NRC where he worked for 19 years and now the UofA. His Edmonton laboratory has world-class networking and virtual reality facilities. He will be responsible for the implementation and design of the solution server and will coordinate various demonstrations over CA*net4. He has published more than 120 scientific papers in various Journals and Conferences. He is on the editorial board of two major academic journals and is the program chair of the ICCV 2008 conferences. Dr. Boulanger is also on many international committees and frequently gives lectures on rapid product development and virtualized reality. He is the founder of the Canadian Virtualized Reality Systems Working Group. He is also the Director of the Advanced Man Machine Interface Laboratory.

Tom Calvert

Role: Senior Researcher, Collaborative Environments

Tom Calvert is a Professor and Director, School of Interactive Arts and Technology. His teaching and research have been at the interfaces between engineering, computing science, and human performance. As a result of working with choreographers, he developed software to create human figure animation from dance notation. This led to the development in 1990 of Life Forms, a software system for choreographers and animators. Life Forms continues to be developed and marketed by Credo Interactive, Inc., a Vancouver company of which Dr. Calvert is founder and interim CEO.

In the early 1990s, Dr. Calvert collaborated with SFU colleague Linda Harasim to develop tools to support online learning. One result of this collaboration was the Virtual-U course management system. Working with other researchers across Canada, Harasim and Calvert were leaders in establishing the TeleLearning Network of Centres of Excellence in 1995.

In 1997, Dr. Calvert joined the new Technical University of BC as a professor and Vicepresident for Research and External Affairs. At TechBC he continued to lead research projects on virtual learning environments and on the visualization of choreography and dance notation. He returned to SFU when it absorbed TechBC in 2002. Dr. Calvert is a registered professional engineer in British Columbia, a member of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering.

For investigation of remote collaboration between dancers the principal facility is the shared Virtual Environments Lab at SFU Surrey. This involves two FakeSpace walls for stereo display driven by an SGI Onyx.

Brian Corrie

Role: Team Leader Shared and Collaborative Environments

Brian Corrie is the Collaboration and Visualization Coordinator for the WestGrid Collaboration and Visualization research program. Brian's research interests are in advanced collaborative environments, computer graphics, scientific visualization, virtual environments (VE), and coupling computational simulation to visualization. Over the last ten years Brian has been involved in the establishment of three virtual environment facilities including the Virtual Environments lab at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia, the Virtual Environments Technology Centre (VETC) at the National Research Council of Canada's Integrated Manufacturing Technologies Institute in London, Ontario, and the Immersive Media Lab at the New Media Innovation Centre (NewMIC) in Vancouver, British Columbia. He was the Project Leader for the Collaborative VE project at ANU, the Technical Leader at the VETC, and the Focus Area Leader for the Immersive and Collaborative Environments research program at NewMIC. Brian recently joined WestGrid to coordinate the collaborative and visualization efforts of WestGrid.

Denis Gadbois

Role: Senior Researcher, Advanced Visualization and Simulation

Denis Gadbois (BDI, U of Montreal; MFA, Cranbrook, Michigan) runs the Future Media Lab on a day-to-day basis. Before joining the Faculty of Environmental Design in 1989, he taught Industrial and Graphic Design at the University of Quebec in Chicoutimi. His research interests include the history of industrial design, furniture design, aesthetic and graphic design and the area of multimedia computer presentation. Between 1985 and 1987 Professor Gadbois had his own consulting practice in Montreal focused on graphic, furniture and product design.

The Future Media Lab is a research facility dedicated to visual research applications and provides services for museums, digital archives, scientific research, architecture, entertainment and industrial design. These include a large format Cyrax 3D Laser Scanning System which can digitize entire buildings and a Thermwood Computer Numerically Controlled 5 axis router which can read digitals files to automatically generate threedimensional physical models up to two metres square.

Marek Hatala

Role: Team Leader, Software Development

Marek Hatala joined the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in May 2002. Before this appointment Dr. Hatala was a faculty at The Technical University of British Columbia, Research Fellow at the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University, UK and Assistant Professor at Department of Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence at The Technical University of Kosice, Slovakia. Dr Hatala's main research areas include knowledge representation and management, ontologies and semantic web, intelligent information retrieval, organizational learning and eLearning. In the ec(h)o project Dr Hatala combined his expertise in user modeling to facilitate an information retrieval of sound objects for museum visitors from the object repository based on user model dynamically built based on the user observations. Dr. Hatala was a technical lead for several repository projects including the development of an interoperability framework called the eduSource Communications Layer (ECL). The ECL strategically links both individual repositories with communities of repositories and provides a robust mechanism for building a federated network of repositories and digital libraries. Currently Dr Hatala a technical lead in the Mellon LionShare Project that extends the ECL with a security layer supporting a distributed trust mechanism. Dr. Hatala is also a principal investigator in the LORNET project that investigates semantic web approaches in supporting interoperability at different levels.

Richard Levy

Role: Principal Investigator and Team Leader, Advanced Visualization and Simulation

 Dr. Levy is a Professor of Planning and Urban Design at The University of Calgary, where he serves as the Planning Director (Chairman) for the Planning Program.  Since 1996, Dr. Levy has also served as Director of Computing for the Faculty of EVDS.  Dr. Levy is a founding member of the Virtual Reality Lab.  Dr. Levy speaks at international and national conferences in the fields of virtual reality, 3D imaging, education, archaeology and planning. His published work appears in journals such as Internet Archaeology, Journal of Visual Studies, Environment and Planning and Plan Canada.

Dr. Levy has directed projects with faculty from Archaeology, Geomatics Engineering, Industrial Design and Kinesiology Using the advanced capabilities provided by MACI, and support from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) Dr. Levy has built a computer reconstruction of the temple site at Phimai, Thailand. The temple complex that was built during the 11th and 12th centuries is one of several UN World Heritage sites in Thailand. Working with Prof. Peter Dawson, Archaeology, and Dr. Charles Arnold Director, Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife, Dr. Levy has created a virtual reconstruction of an Inuvialuit sod house found in the Mackenzie Delta region, NWT as part of an exhibit on Northern Cultures for the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Currently Dr. Levy is working Prof. Dawson on the reconstruction of Thule house forms found in Northern Canada. 

Research on the use of laser scanning technology to preserve historic architecture has been a focus of Dr. Levy's research. Under the Virtual Cities projects, virtual reconstructions of historic buildings in Calgary have been preserved for teaching and research.  Over the last year working with the University of Padova, reconstruction of the Pozzoveggiani Chapel in Padova has been completed along with the reconstruction of several Calgary historic buildings.

Working with Dr. Mary O'Brien, under a grant from Canarie, and CFI, Dr. Levy is developing a virtual environment for teaching German and other foreign languages. Testing of the first module of this application will begin at the end of 2005.

Gilbert Paquette

Role: Team Leader, Media-Rich Repositories and Testing and Evaluation

The Télé-université team is headed by Dr. Gilbert Paquette, Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Engineering in Telelearning and Director of CIRTA, an inter-university research center on telelearning applications hosted by the LICEF center at Télé-université. Key participants in the project are Dr. Ioan Rosca, architect of the Explor@-II and the ADISA systems, Pierre Bernard, project manager, Dr. Karen Lundgren-Cayrol and Louis Guerette, information architect for learning object repositories, Alexis Miara and Frederic Bergeron, lead software developers. Other resources to be involved from LICEF-CIRTA are Dr. France Henri, communities of practice, Dr. Jacqueline Bourdeau and Dr Ileana De la Teja, specialist in instructional design ontologies and learning environment evaluation.

Ron Wakkary

Role: Senior Researcher, Shared and Collaborative Environments

Ron Wakkary is Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His current research includes interaction  design in ambient intelligent environments, design theory and alternative design methods.
Previously, he was faculty in Interactive Arts and the Academic Dean at the Technical  University of British Columbia. He was cofounder of Stadium@Dia in New York where he  collaborated and co-developed pioneering projects in art and the Internet. These projects  have been displayed at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Whitney Museum of American Art, ARCO in
Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has collaborated and partnered  on projects with the Nokia Research Centre, Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim   Museum, the Dia Center for the Arts, Canadian Nature Museum and Electronic Arts  Intermix. And he was principal in oo-design, a web development company in New York. He
has served as an editorial review panelist for the Leonardo Digital Reviews, advisory board  member of WebLab, and he is a member of the Research Advisory Board for the Banff  Centre for the Arts, Banff New Media Institute. He was recently appointed to the Canadian  Culture Online Advisory Board for Heritage Canada. He has presented and published  widely, including Computer Human Interaction ACM, Siggraph, Interact, and  Consciousness Reframed conferences.

Rob Woodbury

Role: Team Leader, Media-Rich Repositories

Rob Woodbury is a Professor and Chair, Graduate Program in the School of Interactive Arts   and Technology at the School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University.  Dr. Woodbury holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Carleton University (Lieutenant  Governor's Silver Medal in Architecture, 1981). He earned his Master of Science and Ph.D.  from Carnegie Mellon University. He was on the faculty at CMU (Architecture and the Engineering Design Research Center) from 1982-1993, at Adelaide University (Australia)  from 1993-2001, at the Technical University of BC from 2001-2002 and is now at Simon   Fraser University.

Dr. Woodbury's research is in computational design. From his research group have come most of the implementations of generative design systems, including Genesis, which was further developed and deployed at Boeing. Since 1995, he has used the Internet to enhance student learning. His emphases have been on peer-to-peer learning and the enhancement of competence and confidence through learning games. His most recent learning project is A•VI•RE, an online architecture gallery for media rich digital exhibitions. Dr. Woodbury is working with the SmartGeometry group and with Bentley Systems on design and use of advanced systems for parametric design. Such systems allow designers to collaboratively design increasingly complex building forms.

Dr. Woodbury has won many grants for both research and teaching. He has over 100 publications. In 2000 he won the Stephen Cole the Elder Prize as one of two top teachers at Adelaide University.