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Lecture/Lecture Series
Dean of Engineering
Undergraduate Lecture Series They Speak in Pixels!
Interactive Digital Games as the 21st Century's Mode of Human Expression
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Peter Raad
Professor and Executive Director
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The Guildhall at SMU |
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Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Time: 4:00 PM
to 5:00 PM
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McMurtry Auditorium Duncan Hall
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A live webcast of this lecture can be seen here. A reception in Martel Hall will follow the talk.
There will a demo of one of the games produced by the students of The Guildhall in DH 1064 from 5-6 p.m.
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Everyone
and everything communicates. Over time, humans have devised and used
different means of communications, surely to coexist, survive, and
organize, but also to build and maintain connections with family,
friends, coworkers, and so on. Some humans have sought to communicate
more broadly across space and time, not so much connecting with
familiar beings, but rather planting ideas. Other humans, however,
sought to focus their communications inwardly in pursuit of personal
discovery and growth. With technological advances came naturally new
media of communications with ever increasing reach and power. The pace
of technological advancement, however, has not been constant over human
existence, but has rather been constantly accelerating. The most recent
advent of the information age with its technologies of networking and
interactivity have dramatically changed how we live, learn, work, and
play. These technologies have also changed how we choose to organize
ourselves – the very essence of the notion of community – as well as
how we discover, communicate, and grow. Video games are a strong
manifestation of the power of interactive networked technologies, and
the arts and sciences that underpin digital game development open up
new and exciting avenues of human thought, discovery, and growth. As we
learn how to harness the coupling of bits and neurons, we will be
bringing together imagination, thinking, feeling, and expression, with
heretofore unfathomable consequences on every aspect of the human
experience. What will we say with pixels? The Guildhall at SMU was
incubated in 2002 as a direct response to the expressed needs of the
gaming industry’s leaders for professionals who have been educated and
trained at the intersection of the arts and sciences of digital game
development. The novel curriculum that emerged combined the benefits of
the academic and apprenticeship models to help produce immediate
practitioners and future leaders for an emerging discipline that will
undoubtedly play a key role in how human beings will express themselves
and interact. Representative examples of the creative expressions of
Guildhall students will give us the opportunity to experience what they
are saying in pixels. |
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| speaker bio |
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Peter
E. Raad received the BSME (with Honors), MS, and Ph.D. in mechanical
engineering from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In 1986, he
joined the mechanical engineering department at SMU as an Assistant
Professor and is currently a Full Professor. He holds the Linda
Wertheimer Hart Professorship and is the founding Director of the Linda
and Mitch Hart eCenter at SMU, a university-wide center established in
2000 to stimulate, facilitate, and support innovative
multi-disciplinary activities that enable the creative and responsible
development and use of interactive network technologies. Under his
leadership, the Hart eCenter incubated in 2002 The Guildhall at SMU, a
novel industry-university collaborative educational program designed
from the ground up to educate and train future practitioners and
innovators in the fast-growing field of digital game development. The
program underscores the belief that the arts and sciences of
interactive digital media, which reside at the intersection of
information technology and cognitive sciences, are the 21st century’s
mode of human discovery and expression. Prior to becoming the founding
director of the Hart eCenter and Executive Director of the Guildhall,
Prof. Raad served as the Associate Dean of the SMU School of
Engineering, in charge of all academic affairs, research and graduate
studies, and computer operations. Between 1990 through 1993, he held
the J. Lindsay Embrey Trustee Professorship in Engineering, an endowed
chair for an outstanding junior faculty member. He has received several
awards, including four times the Outstanding Graduate Faculty Award,
twice the Outstanding Undergraduate Faculty Award, and the Sigma Xi
Faculty Research Award. In 1999-2000, he was named the ASME North Texas
Section Engineer of the Year. Prof. Raad has published over 40 articles
and over 100 conference papers. He has received over $2.5M in funding
from government and industry in support of his extensive research in
tsunami mitigation and fluid wave interactions with solid structures,
as well as his founding in 1995 of an industry-university collaborative
laboratory dedicated to the computational modeling and laser-based
measurement of nanoscale electronic devices. |
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