Welcome and Introduction; Kinect for Xbox 360 – The Innovation Journey

Speaker Bios

As corporate vice president of the External Research Division of Microsoft Research, Tony Hey is responsible for the worldwide external research and technical computing strategy across Microsoft Corporation. He leads the company’s efforts to build long-term public-private partnerships with global scientific and engineering communities, spanning broad reach and in-depth engagements with academic and research institutions, related government agencies and industry partners. His responsibilities also include working with internal Microsoft groups to build future technologies and products that will transform computing for scientific and engineering research. Hey also oversees Microsoft Research’s efforts to enhance the quality of higher education around the world.

Before joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the U.K.’s e-Science Initiative, managing the government’s efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies. Before leading this initiative, Hey worked as Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science; and, Dean of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Southampton, where he helped build the department into one of the most respected computer science research institutions in England.

His research interests focus on parallel programming for parallel systems built from mainstream commodity components. With Jack Dongarra, Rolf Hempel and David Walker, he wrote the first draft of a specification for a new message-passing standard called MPI. This initiated the process that led to the successful MPI standard of today.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering. He also has served on several national committees in the U.K., including committees of the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry and the Office of Science and Technology. He was a member of the British Computer Society, the Institute of Engineering and Technology, and the Institute of Physics.

Tony Hey also has a passionate interest in communicating the excitement of science to young people. He has written ‘popular’ books on quantum mechanics and on relativity.

Hey is a graduate of Oxford University, with both an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics.

Andrew Fitzgibbon is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. His research interests are in the intersection of computer vision and computer graphics, with excursions into neuroscience. Recent papers have been on the recovery of 3D geometry from 2D images, general-purpose camera calibration, human 3D perception, and the application of natural image statistics to problems of figure/ground separation and new-view synthesis. He has twice received the IEEE’s Marr Prize, the highest in computer vision; and software he wrote won an Engineering Emmy Award in 2002 for significant contributions to the creation of complex visual effects. He studied Mathematics and Computer Science at University College Cork, and received his PhD from Edinburgh University in 1997. Until June 2005 he held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Oxford University’s Department of Engineering Science.

Having joined Microsoft Game Studios (MGS) two years ago, Kudo is the creative director on Project Natal and general manager of three internal studios. As creative director on Project Natal, he is responsible for the creative direction and cohesion of all elements of the Natal program. As general manager, he is working on nine different AAA titles developed both internally and externally.

Prior to working at MGS, Kudo was the general manager and executive producer of EA Chicago. He was responsible for establishing EA Chicago as a leading next-gen video game studio. In this role, he set the creative tone and production methodologies for all EA Chicago games including the hit franchise “EA Sports Fight Night.” In the last five years, the games Kudo worked on have won 14 game-of-the-year awards including the coveted Spike TV Video Game Award, “Golden Monkey.”

During his 13 years in the video game industry, Kudo has designed such genre defining features as “Fight Night’s” Total Punch Control system and the Army Men Air Attack Winch Mechanic. His games have grossed more than $1 billion dollars worldwide including several #1 selling products.

Kudo majored in philosophy at George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he was Harrison Hall champion in “Tecmo Bowl,” “Double Dribble,” and “Racquet Attack.” He is a former lion tamer and also an avid collector of butterflies.

Date:
Haut-parleurs:
Tony Hey, Andrew Fitzgibbon, and Kudo Tsunoda