Danny Bilson – Director of the USC Games Program and Chair of SCA Interactive Media & Games Division. Executive vice president, Core Games, for THQ, Bilson has more than 20 years of writing, directing and creative development for all major entertainment mediums, including video games, film, television. He teaches the SCA character development and writing for games.

Tracy Fullerton – Founding Director (emeritus) of the USC Games Program, and former Chair of the Interactive Media and Games Division, Fullerton is currently Director of the USC Game Innovation Lab. Fullerton is an experimental game designer, entrepreneur, and author of Game Design Workshop, a design textbook in use at game programs worldwide. She teaches SCA’s core game design courses for incoming graduate and undergraduate students as well as the game directing class.

Richard Lemarchand – Lead designer on the critical and commercial hit series of games Uncharted, from the Sony-owned developer Naughty Dog, Lemarchand has a long history in the commercial games industry. He has been a full-time USC Games professor since 2012, teaching classes in game design, game production, and more. He makes experimental games as part of the USC Game Innovation Lab and his first book, A Playful Production Process: For Game Designers (and Everyone), was released by the MIT Press in 2021.

Andy Nealen – Andy Nealen is an Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts and Computer Science in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the Department of Computer Science at USC Viterbi. He teaches and researches in Game Design, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Graphics, and Game Engineering. Andy's work seeks to increase the accessibility of computer-based tools across a variety of application environments, drawing upon minimalist principles he first encountered while obtaining his Dipl.-Ing. in Architecture and Structural Engineering from TU Darmstadt. In particular, his research leverages and extends our understanding of how humans perceive shape, motion, and color. This focus on minimal and accessible designs for complex systems is evidenced in the Apple-Design-Award-winning game Osmos, as well as in his Sketch-Based Modeling, Game-Space Exploration, and Game Heuristics research. Andy received his PhD in Computer Science from TU Berlin, is a regular speaker at international game and computer graphics conferences, and is a regular contributor to ACM SIGGRAPH.

TreaAndrea M. Russworm, Ph.D. - Dr. Russworm is the Microsoft Endowed Chair and a Professor in the Interactive Media & Games Division at the University of Southern California. She is also the founder of Radical Play (a games-based public humanities initiative and after school program), and she has been a professor and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at UMass Amherst. A prolific author and editor, Russworm is a Series Editor of Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture (Duke University Press). She is the author or editor of three books: Blackness is Burning; Gaming Representation; and Theorizing Tyler Perry. With research expertise in digital culture, video games, and popular African American media, Professor Russworm’s scholarship and interviews have also been shared on CNN, The History Channel, Turner Classic Movies, in podcasts, and on streaming platforms like Twitch. She is a video game Hall of Fame voter, and she is currently writing a new monograph on The Sims and a book on race and the politics of play.

Mark Bolas – A pioneer in immersive technologies, Bolas is a research scientist, artist, and designer exploring perception, agency, and intelligence. He is director of the Mixed Reality Lab at USC. He teaches the SCA thesis and thesis preparation classes.

Peter Brinson – An award-winning game designer and developer (The Cat and the Coup, Waco Resurrection), Brinson’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, the IGF, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and SIGGRAPH. He teaches the procedural media and intermediate game project classes.

Jim Huntley – Jim Huntley is a professor for USC's Interactive Media & Games department and head of marketing for USC Games. He led the creation of USC Games' Gerald A. Lawson Fund, which will support Black and Indigenous students who wish to pursue undergraduate or graduate degrees in game design or computer science from USC's program.

Margaret Moser – An experienced technical director and game designer, Margaret Moser has a background in mobile as well as experimental designs, including projects with the New York based development studios Playmatics and Leisure Collective.

Kiki Benzon – A multimedia artist with a background in English literature and neuroscience, as an associate professor of practice in the Media Arts + Practice division, Kiki teaches courses on transmedia entertainment, digital research methods, and interactive media.

Laird Malamed is the founding COO and CFO of Oculus VR, Inc, acquired in 2014 by Facebook and now the center of Meta's Reality Labs division. Currently, Malamed directs long-term AR/VR/MR interaction models and operations at Meta's Reality Labs Research. He is a 30+ year veteran of the entertainment industry.  Malamed was Sr. Vice President and head of development at Activision Blizzard overseeing software, hardware and manufacturing for products such as Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, Spider-man and Skylanders. He started his career in sound editing at Sony Pictures and Lucasfilm. In his role as Adjunct Professor in Interactive Media, he works closely with all of the MFA thesis candidates on their final projects.  Malamed earned a joint BS degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering and Film & Media Studies, and a MA from USC's School of Cinematic Arts. Malamed is a former member of the MIT Corporation, the governing board of MIT. He serves on the Alumni Council for the School of Cinematic Arts and has served on the boards of the California Science Center and iCivics. He co-hosts "The Magic of John Williams" podcast as part of TheIndyCast podcast and co-hosts "For Your Ears Only," the music of James Bond as part of BondCast.

Marientina Gotsis – Marientina Gotsis is Professor of Practice, director of the USC Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center, and founder of the USC Games for Health Initiative. Gotsis is a virtual reality artist, interaction designer, health researcher in academia and industry, and educator/mentor of award-winning student projects for the past 20 years. She directs the MA in Media Arts, Games and Health and the MFA emphasis in Games and Health and teaches participatory design, mixed methods research, narrative medicine, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

David White – With over 25 years (and counting!) of interactive entertainment production management and design experience, David has produced and shipped over 60 games on multiple platforms, from console to mobile. He has worked with DreamWorks, Paramount, Nickelodeon, Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony and many others. David teaches production management in the Advanced Games program.

Robert Nashak – Former Chief Operating Officer of Survios, one of the premiere VR game developers. Prior to that, Nashak held executive positions at BBC Worldwide, Electronic Arts, Yahoo! Games, and Glu Mobile. He teaches the business and management of games.

Joseph Garlington – Former VP of the Interactive Studio at Walt Disney Imagineering, Joe Garlington is a veteran creator of themed entertainment having designed attractions for virtually all Disney theme parks and many other resorts and other businesses.

Heather Desurvire – Instructor in SCA Interactive Media & Games Division, Heather is President of User Behavioristics, Inc. a Player Experience Insight company consulting to top publishers and studios for creating better consumer games through optimal user and player experience. A published author and contributor to the HCI and game community knowledge base in Player Experience. Teaching the CTIN 404 course, students learn to analyze games and research tools for improving game through the player experience design. A former student with a #1 game on iTunes, tweeted “…Most useful class ever”.

Cynthia Woll – As a games industry producer and designer for more than 25 years, Woll has worked for a variety of game publishers and developers, including Atari, EA and Playtika. She has deep expertise in the production and design of free to play mobile games, and has spearheaded the launch and management of many successful titles.

Candace Reckinger – Candace Reckinger is an artist-director specializing in hybrid media and visual music using a mix of animation and photography. Her work ventures beyond the boundaries of conventional narrative exploring the border between the figurative and the abstract, the mythic and experiential, and the tension between movement and stillness. Her inspiration emerges from myth, landscape and music.

Angela Jones – Angie Jones is an artist and animator specializing in computer generated character and creature animation. As an animation director/supervisor and lead animator she works closely with directors and vfx supervisors to design character performances and sequences for major motion pictures, commercials and games. She enjoys the challenge of moving between the “sweet and endearing” and the “evil and deadly.” Her film and commercial work include Oscar-winning films, two Clios, and one VES award.

Mike Patterson – Mike Patterson is a director, designer and animation artist working in visual music. His animated film Commuter, along with 7 of his music videos, are in The Museum of Modern Artʼs permanent collection.

Eric Hanson – Eric Hanson is a visual effects designer specializing in the creation of digital environments. Having worked with leading visual effects houses such as Digital Domain, Sony Imageworks, Dream Quest Images, and Walt Disney Feature Animation, his work can be seen in “The Day After Tomorrow”, “Cast Away”, “Mission to Mars”, “Fantasia 2000”, and “The Fifth Element”, among others.

John Mahoney – John Mahoney is an adjunct faculty member who currently works in Los Angeles as a Concept Designer and Independent Film Maker. John’s illustration work has been showcased in Spectrum, the Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art and in the book Erotic Signature, the World’s Greatest Erotic Art of Today.

Maks Naprowski – Maks Naporowski joined the entertainment industry in Los Angeles as a Computer Graphics Supervisor at Swanson Productions in 1998 on a project called Fish Tank. In 2000, Maks contributed his talents to Sony Pictures Imageworks, where as lead technical director he tackled character concepts, animation pipelines, character setup and animation for such films Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Chubbchubbs! and Stuart Little 2. At Imageworks, Maks headed technical animation teams, was involved in pre-visualization, character rigging and animation on such films as Matrix Revolutions, Polar Express, The Aviator, Superman Returns, Ghost Rider, Beowulf and I am Legend. In 2010 Maks joined the full time faculty of John C.Hench Animation & Digital Arts at USC School of Cinematic Arts as Instructor of Cinema Practice.

Musa Brooker – Musa Brooker (that’s ‘moo-say’) is a Los Angeles based Director, Animator and Producer. Specializing in Stop Motion, the Philadelphia native holds a BFA in Animation from University of the Arts and an MFA in Experimental Animation from The California Institute of the Arts where he was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow. His directing resume includes the short film The Story of Pines for Participant Media, the web series Laurie’s Stories inspired by the TBS sitcom Cougar Town, and the recent Bratz web series produced by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios and based on the iconic doll brand.

Andres Kratky – Andreas Kratky is a media artist and assistant professor in the School for Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Kratky’s work comprises several award-winning projects such as That’s Kyogen, the interactive installation and DVD Bleeding Through – Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986, the algorithmic cinema system Soft Cinema, and the interactive costume projection in the opera The Jew of Malta.

Jesse Vigil – Jesse Vigil is a professional writer, game designer, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Psychic Bunny, and the gone-but-not-forgotten indie games labelCodename. Currently, he is the Director of a shadowy Alternate Reality Game at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts that would be known as Reality Ends Here – if it actually existed, which it of course does not. The rest of the time Jesse teaches and is a Research Associate at the Game Innovation Lab.

Sean Bouchard – Sean has worked as a game designer and research project lead in the University of Southern California’s Interactive Media and Games Division since 2011. He regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on game design fundamentals, experimental game design, polishing and publishing games, and game production. He also makes independent games and talks about game design on the internet.

Gordon Bellamy – Gordon Bellamy is currently a part time lecturer at the University of Southern California who has played key business and product leadership roles at Tencent, Electronic Arts, as a designer on Madden NFL Football, and MTV. He served as Executive Director of both the game industry’s trade organization, the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences and the International Game Developers Association.

David Su is a game developer, musician, engineer, sound designer, and researcher interested in creating new musical experiences through technology. He is an adjunct assistant professor in the USC Games program, where he teaches a course on sound design for games. In addition, he is the lead audio programmer at Brass Lion Entertainment, as well as one of the co-organizers of Game Audio LA.

Aniko Imre – Anikó Imre is an associate professor and chair of the Division of Cinema and Media Studies and a member of the faculty board of the Interdivisional Media Arts and Practice Doctoral Program (iMAP). She has published widely and teaches courses on film and media theory, global television, national and transnational media and European media.

Alex McDowell – Alex McDowell is Visiting Associate Professor in the USC Cinematic Arts divisions of Interactive Media and Games, Production, and Media Arts + Practice, where he is also creative director of the USC World Building Media Lab and the thought leadership network, theUSC World Building Institute.

Scott Fisher – Scott Fisher is a Professor and founding Chair of the Interactive Media Division and Associate Dean of Research at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He is an interaction designer whose work focuses primarily on mobile media, interactive environments and technologies of presence. He is also Director of USC’s Mobile and Environmental Media Lab.

Scott Easley – An Emmy, Telly and Annie-winning commercial writer/creator, Easley has supervised animation teams for The Incredibles 2, Ratatouille, and the Wall-E video games. He teaches our games pipelines courses and mentors the art leads for our Advanced Games program.

Matthew Whiting – A fifteen year veteran of the games industry, Matt Whiting has worked on games including Spyro the Dragon, True Crime, Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, and Shrek 2. He mentors the technical leads for our Advanced Games program.

Jose Villeta – Director for Technology for Disney Interactive, Villeta teaches courses on Game Hardware Architectures and Game Engine Development in the Department of Computer Science.

St. John Colon – St. John Colon is a founder, manager, art director, UI/UX designer, game designer and producer currently developing several social and mobile games, managing multiple internal & external development teams, and setting core technical standards in a variety of areas. St. John Colon (MFA, UCLA) has shipped more than 17.7 million video games in 55 different countries in cooperation with Square, Warner Brothers, Nickelodeon and and Disney/Pixar. St. John serves as an adjunct Professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and on the Advisory board of the Inner City Education Foundation of LA Arts program.

Artem Kovalovs – A graphics and games programmer at Naughty Dog, Kovalovs teaches console game development and immersive game development in the Department of Computer Science.

Trina Gregory – Trina Gregory is a senior lecturer for ITP teaching technology, programming, and mobile classes. She has worked full-time in the computer science field for over 12 years, mainly for SAIC developing, writing, and managing software for the Department of Defense.

Sanjay Madhav – Senior Lecturer in the Information Technology Program. Madhav is the author of Game Programming Algorithms and Techniques and co-author of Multiplayer Game Programming. He teaches programming courses, including some of the core video game programming courses for undergraduates. He has worked at several developers including Electronic Arts, Neversoft, and Pandemic.

Tom Sloper – Tom Sloper has been a game producer and designer for over 30 years, having designed and produced games for most major console platforms from the 2600, 7800, and Vectrex on up to the Playstation, Xbox 360, Dreamcast, and DS, as well as games for PC, Mac, Internet, and IPTV. He’s worked for Sega, Atari, Activision, and Yahoo. He is currently a full time faculty member of USC’s Information Technology Program.

Shirin Salemnia – Shirin Laor-Raz Salemnia is currently a part time faculty member of USC’s Information Technology Program. She is actively involved in the organization Women in Gaming, as well as serving as an advisor for multiple institutions including The White House Council of Women and Girls, Los Angeles Film School, The Girl Scouts of Greater LA, Woodbury University, the Bixel Exchange in collaboration with the LA Chamber of Commerce, and Girls in Tech. She is also the founder of multiple organizations including PlayWerks and WhizGirlsAcademy.

Lance Winkel – Lance Winkel is an award winning animated filmmaker, film festival programmer, animation educator, and practicing artist. As an effects artist and animator, his commercial clients have included Ford, Honda, Nissan, and Warner Brothers. Lance has taught 3D Computer Graphics Animation for over a decade at many prominent universities across southern California.

Nitin Kale – Nitin Kalé is an Associate Professor of Engineering Practice in the Information Technology Program (ITP) and the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) at the Viterbi School of Engineering. Nitin is also the Associate Director for Academic Affairs at ITP. He has taught at ITP since 1995 in the areas of programming, web design, interactive multimedia and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

Mike Lee – Mike Lee teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in digital entrepreneurship and enterprise systems for USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering and Marshall School of Business. Prior to USC, he spent the previous decade at Fox and Warner Bros, as a VP of Technology and Director; Netscape as a Technology Evangelist; and CTO/VP Technology for various Internet/software companies.

Michael Crowley – Michael Crowley worked for 20 years in industry as a programmer, manager, and project manager. He came to USC in 1999 as a full-time lecturer with the department of Computer Science, in the Viterbi School of Engineering. Michael has enjoyed being the Director of ITP for the past six years.

Kendra Walther – Kendra Walther is a full-time lecturer in the Information Technology Program. She has worked for the Aerospace Corporation and taught Computer Science at Cal State LA, St. Albans School, and Milwaukee School of Engineering.

Ron Artstein – Ron Artstein is a research assistant professor at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies as a computational linguist. His training and early work was in theoretical linguistics, specializing in formal semantics. Since 2004, when he joined the ARRAU project (which has since ended), he has expanded his work to computational linguistics, specifically working with annotated corpora. He is presently coordinating an effort to create and organize a corpus of spoken dialogue which is used in developing language comprehension and speech of virtual humans.

David Devault – David Devault is a Research Assistant Professor at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. His research lies in the area of natural language dialogue systems, which converse and interact with human speakers in a natural language such as English.

Andrew Gordon – Andrew S. Gordon is a Research Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of Interactive Narrative Research at the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California. His research advances technologies for automatically analyzing and generating narrative interpretations of experiences.

Jonathan Gratch – Jonathan Gratch is the associate director for virtual humans research at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, a research professor of computer science and psychology, and co-director of USC’s Computational Emotion Group. His research focuses on virtual humans and computational models of emotion. He studies the relationship between cognition and emotion, the cognitive processes underlying emotional responses, and the influence of emotion on decision-making and physical behavior.

Randall Hill – Randall W. Hill, Jr. became the executive director of the USC Institute for Creative Technologies in 2006. A leader in understanding how classic storytelling and high-tech tools can create meaningful learning experiences, Hill steers the institute’s exploration of how virtual humans, mixed reality worlds, advanced computer graphics, dramatic films, social simulations and educational video games can augment more traditional methods for imparting lessons.

Anton Leuski – Anton Leuski is a research assistant professor at the USC Department of Computer Science and a research scientist at the USC Institute for Creative Techonologies. His research interests include interactive information access, human-computer interaction, and machine learning. Leuski’s recent work has focused on applying statistical information retrieval approaches to dialogue text analysis, natural language understanding and generation. Of primary interest is the development of the statistical approaches for building effective text classification techniques with small amounts of training data. These text classification approaches allow very rapid development of practical solutions for natural language dialogue applications.

Louis-Phillipe Morency – Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency is currently assistant professor at the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University. He was formerly research assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and research scientist at USC Institute for Creative Technologies where he led the Multimodal Communication and Computation Laboratory.

Kenji Sagae – Kenji Sagae is a research assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and a research scientist in the USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Prior to joining USC in 2008, he was a research associate in the computer science department of the University of Tokyo. His main areas of research are natural language processing and computational linguistics, focusing on data-driven approaches for syntactic parsing, predicate-argument analysis and discourse processing. His current work includes the application of these techniques in various application areas, such as dialogue systems, modeling of human communication dynamics, and analysis of personal narrative in blog posts.

Steven Scherer – Currently, Scherer is working as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies under the supervision of Louis-Philippe Morency. His research fields of interest are human machine interaction, social signal processing, and affective computing.

Bill Swartout – William Swartout is chief technology officer at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies, providing overall direction to the institute’s research programs. He is also a research professor in the Computer Science Department at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

David Traum – David Traum is a principal scientist at ICT and a research faculty member at the Department of Computer Science at USC. At ICT, Traum leads the Natural Language Dialogue Group, which consists of seven Ph.D.s, four students, and four other researchers.

Paul Rosenbloom – Paul S. Rosenbloom is a professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and is currently working with the USC Institute for Creative Technologies on a new cognitive/virtual-human architecture – Sigma (Σ) – based on graphical models.

Kallirroi Georgila – Kallirroi Georgila is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, and a Research Scientist at the USC Institute for Creative Technologies.

Parag Halvadar – Parag Havaldar received a PhD in Computer Vision and Graphics from the University of Southern California in 1996. Since then he has been working in the media industry to design/architect software solutions for the multimedia pipeline from authoring, compression, distribution, digital rights management. Currently, Dr, Havaldar is a software supervisor at SONY Pictures Imageworks, where he leads SONY’s proprietory efforts in the area of performance capture.

Saty Raghavachary – Dr. Saty Raghavachary is a Senior Lecturer at the CS Dept, where he teaches courses on computer graphics (CG), databases and introductory programming. Before joining USC full-time, Saty was a Designated Support Specialist at Autodesk Inc., makers of Maya, Softimage, 3DS Max, AutoCAD and several other industry-leading software tools.

Morteza Dehghani – Morteza Dehghani is an Assistant Professor of psychology, computer science and the Brain and Creativity Institute (BCI) at University of Southern California. His research spans the boundary between psychology and artificial intelligence. His work investigates properties of cognition by using documents of the social discourse, such as narratives, social media, transcriptions of speeches and news articles, in conjunction to behavioral studies.

Jerry Hobbs – Jerry R. Hobbs is a prominent American researcher in the fields of computational linguistics, discourse analysis, and artificial intelligence.

Rajiv Mahesawarn – Rajiv Maheswaran is CEO of Second Spectrum, an innovative sports analytics and data visualization startup located in Los Angeles, California. Prior to Second Spectrum, Rajiv served as a research assistant professor within the University of Southern California’s Department of Computer Science, and a project leader at the Information Sciences Institute at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He and Second Spectrum COO Yu-Han Chang co-directed the Computational Behavior Group at USC.

John May – John May is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Adjunct Faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and principal of millionsofmovingparts, a Los Angeles-based design practice.

Suya You – Suya You is a Research Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. His expertise is in the fundamental and applied aspects of interactive multimodal systems, computer vision, and 3D graphics and visualization.

Michael Arbib – Michael A. Arbib is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science, as well as a Professor of Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Neuroscience and Psychology at USC. As both a theoretical neuroscientist and a computer scientist, Arbib argues that by deducing the brain’s operating principles from a computational standpoint we can both learn more about how brains function and also gain tools for building learning machines.

Shaddin Dughmi – Shaddin Dughmi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at USC, where he is a member of the Theory Group. He received a B.S. in computer science, summa cum laude, from Cornell University in 2004, and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2011.

Shahram Ghandeharizadeh – Shahram Ghandeharizadeh received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1990. Since then, he has been on the faculty at the University of Southern California. In 1995, he received an award from the School of Engineering at USC in recognition of his research activities. His primary research interests include design and implementation of multimedia storage managers, parallel database systems, and active databases.

William Halford – William Halfond is an associate professor in computer science at the University of Southern California. Halfond’s research is in software engineering in the area of program analysis and software testing. His research work focuses on improving quality assurance for web applications, developer-oriented techniques for reducing the power consumption of smartphone mobile applications, and software security.

Ellis Horowitz – Dr. Ellis Horowitz is currently Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. Dr. Horowitz has held numerous academic administrative jobs including Associate Chairman of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin. At U.S.C. he was chairman of the Computer Science Department from 1990 to 1999. After completing his term as Computer Science department chairman, Dr. Horowitz was appointed Director of Information Technology and Distance Education in USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering.

Ethan Katz-Bassett – Ethan Katz-Basset is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. With his colleagues Ramesh Govindan, and Wyatt Lloyd, he runs a networking and systems research group. His primary interests are in networks and distributed systems. His goal is to improve the reliability and performance of Internet services.

David Kempe – David Kempe received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2003, and has been on the faculty in the computer science department at USC since the Fall of 2004, where he is currently an Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs. His primary research interests are in computer science theory and the design and analysis of algorithms, with a particular emphasis on social networks, algorithms for feature selection, and game-theoretic and pricing questions.

Sven Koenig – Sven Koenig is a professor in computer science at the University of Southern California. Sven is interested in intelligent systems that have to operate in large, nondeterministic, nonstationary or only partially known domains. Most of his research centers around techniques for decision making (planning and learning) that enable single situated agents (such as robots or decision-support systems) and teams of agents to act intelligently in their environments and exhibit goal-directed behavior in real-time, even if they have only incomplete knowledge of their environment, imperfect abilities to manipulate it, limited or noisy perception or insufficient reasoning speed.

Dennis McLeod – Dennis McLeod is currently Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California, and Director of the Semantic Information Research Laboratory. Dr. McLeod has published widely in the areas of data and knowledge base systems, federated databases, database models and design, ontologies, knowledge discovery, scientific data management, information trust and privacy, and multimedia information management.

Ulrich Neumann – Dr. Ulrich Neumann is a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. He earned an MSEE from SUNY at Buffalo in 1980 and his computer science Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993 where his focus was on parallel algorithms for interactive volume-visualization. His research relates to video visualization, interactive media, tracking for augmented reality, and human facial modeling, rendering, and animation.

Guarav Sukhatme – Gaurav S. Sukhatme is a Professor of Computer Science (joint appointment in Electrical Engineering) at the University of Southern California (USC). He is the co-director of the USC Robotics Research Laboratory and the director of the USC Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory which he founded in 2000. His research interests are in multi-robot systems and sensor/actuator networks.

Milind Tambe – Milind Tambe is Founding Co-Director of CAIS, the USC Center for AI for Society, and Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor in Engineering at the University of Southern California(USC).

Shanghua Teng – Dr. Shang-Hua Teng is a professor who has twice won the prestigious Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science, first in 2008, for developing the theory of smoothed analysis , and then in 2015, for designing the groundbreaking nearly-linear time Laplacian solver for network systems.

Cyrus Shahabi – Cyrus Shahabi is a Professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Spatial Sciences and the Director of the Information Laboratory (InfoLAB) at the Computer Science Department and also the Director of the NSF’s Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC) at the University of Southern California (USC). He is also the director of Informatics at USC’ Viterbi School of Engineering. He was the CTO and co-founder of a USC spin-off, Geosemble Technologies, which was acquired in July 2012.

Claire Bono – Claire Bono is a lecturer who teaches CSCI 455 Introduction to Programming Systems Design

Sheila Tejada – Dr. Sheila Tejada is currently a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, where she teaches courses and performs research applying artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics in education.

Ann Cherevenak – Ann Cherevenak leads research and development projects in the area of scientific data management, including policy-driven data management. Her current projects include research that explores policy-based network resource allocation and the relationship between policy-driven data placement and scientific workflow management.

Yolanda Gil – Yolanda Gil is the Principal Investigator and Project Leader of the Interactive Knowledge Capture research group at USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI). Her research focuses on intelligent interfaces for knowledge capture, which is a central topic in our projects concerning knowledge-based planning and problem solving, information analysis and assessment of trust, semantic annotation tools, agent and software choreography, and community-wide development of knowledge bases.

Jihie Kim – Jihie Kim is a Research Assistant Professor in Computer Science at the University of Southern California and a Computer Scientist at the USC/ Information Sciences Institute.

Kristina Lerman – Kristina Lerman is a Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute, and Research Associate Professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Computer Science Department. Her research applies graph theory and machine learning to problems in computational social science, including social network and social media analysis, information diffusion in networks, social voting and recommendation, and more recently, dynamics of cognitive performance.

Nora Ayanian – Nora Ayanian is a Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science at University of Southern California. Her research focuses on creating end-to-end solutions for coordinating teams of robots that start from truly high-level specifications and deliver code for individual robots in the team, such as using simple multitouch inputs to control a team of UAVs.

Leana Golubchick – Leana Golubchik is a Professor of Computer Science, with a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering, at USC. Her research interests are broadly in the design and evaluation of large scale distributed systems, with emphasis on analysis techniques needed for rapid evaluation of design ideas that lead to insight about systems’ performance and reliability.

Yan Liu – Yan Liu has been an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department, of the Viterbi School of Engineering at USC since August 2010. Before that, she was a research staff member in the Data Analytics Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center since November 2006.

Maja Mataric – Maja Matarić is the Vice Dean for Research for the Viterbi School of Engineering. She is responsible for research development and mentoring, interdisciplinary collaborations and programs, research awards coordination, K-12 outreach activities, and technology transfer.

Henry Jenkins – One of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of pervasive digital content, Jenkins is at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics and culture.

Dmitri Williams – With research focusing on the social and economic impacts of new media, Williams was the first researcher to use online games for experiments, and to undertake longitudinal research on video games.

Garry Schyman – Adjunct Instructor in the SMPTV (Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television) program in the Thornton School of Music. Schyman is an experienced film, TV and game composer. His credits for games include the Bioshock series for which he won the BAFTA award on Bioshock Infinite. Schyman is a part time instructor but remains a full time active composer for games and other media.

Anthony Borquez – Anthony Borquez is the Founder and CEO of Grab. In 2013, Anthony spun out a new company: Grab Analytics. Grab Analytics is a strategic partner with Twitter and helps companies effectively market on the Twitter platform. Anthony was Founder/CEO of Blue Label Interactive. Dr. Borquez has been teaching at the University of Southern California since 1994.

Dan Nabel – Dan Nabel is an in-house attorney at Riot Games. Prof. Nabel currently teaches “Topics in Entertainment: Video Game Law” and previously co-taught “Deposition Strategies and Techniques” for several years. He also serves as a Director for CASA of Los Angeles — an organization dedicated to improving the lives of neglected and abused foster children with trained volunteer advocates.