Anne Sullivan is an Assistant Professor in Digital Media and head of the StoryCraft Lab at Georgia Tech.

She received her PhD in Computer Science from University of California, Santa Cruz, where she created an artificial intelligence framework to support playable stories - stories that adapted and changed based on player choice. Before returning to school for her PhD, she was a game developer and designer with experience at AAA studios and as an independent developer.

Her research focuses on playful and storied interactive experiences from a feminist and humanistic perspective, with an emphasis on human-centered artificial intelligence (AI). To that end, Dr. Sullivan has established herself in the fields of critical game analysis through her work in feminist analysis of games, and co-creative AI through her work in educational interactive experiences and AI-assisted tools for craft and narratives. She also studies craft as an analog counterpart to playful and storied interactive experiences, researching in the exciting and emerging field of computational craft.

Dr. Sullivan is an award-winning quilter and the concept designer and producer of Loominary – a digital game system controlled with a loom - which has been shown internationally, including at the SAAM Arcade exhibit at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Education:

• PhD Computer Science - University of California, Santa Cruz

Areas of
Expertise:

• Computational Craft
• Craft
• Craft Games
• Digital Media
• Games
• Interactive Narrative
• Narrative
• STEM Education

She is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and a practicing designer, researcher, and educator who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. As an avid photographer and illustrator, her work has been recognized in the American Institute of Architects National Photography Competition and she has contributed graphics to several exhibitions and publications. As an educator, she was recognized as one of two recipients of the 2017-2018 American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS)/ Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) New Faculty Teaching Award and a 2021 AIAS Educator Honor Award. 

Her research and practice experiences span design/build, early intervention design education, transatlantic studies, and historic site documentation and visualization. She was an inaugural Mellon History Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in fall 2021 for the project "From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South," supporting research and development of the Race, Space, and Architecture in the United States seminar at Georgia Tech. 

Expanding experiences abroad to enrich both teaching and research agendas , she was the 2015 Society of Architectural Historians’ H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellow. Between June 2016 and May 2017, she traveled to Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Cuba, and Japan to research the impact of tourism on cultural heritage sites; research blog posts can be found here. 

Currently, she is working with Auburn University Associate Professor Liu and an interdisciplinary team from the McWhorter School of Building Science, the Department of History, and the Media Production Group on “Walking in the Footsteps of History”, an experimental survey and modeling project to digitally reconstruct the area south of the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the 'Bloody Sunday' events of March 7, 1965. This project is working to record and represent the built environment through the use of 3D LiDAR scans, UAV photogrammetry, and digital modeling. The team was awarded a $50,000 grant 2019 National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant Program to compile a Historic Structures Report on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

Willkens serves as a Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology initiative lead for research activities related to just, resilient, and informed communities.

Mathieu Dahan is an Assistant Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His research interests are in combinatorial optimization, game theory, and predictive analytics, with applications to service operations management and disaster logistics. His primary focus is on developing strategies for improving the resilience of large-scale infrastructures — particularly, transportation and natural gas networks — in the face of correlated failures such as security attacks and natural disasters. Current projects include: (i) Strategic design of network inspection systems; and (ii) Analytics-based response operations under uncertainty.

Dr. Dahan received a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computational Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a M.Eng. and B.Eng. from the École Centrale Paris, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Paris-Sud University. He is the recipient of the MIT Robert Thurber Fellowship, the MIT Robert Guenassia Award, the Honorable Mention for the J-WAFS Fellowships, and the Best Poster Award at the Princeton Day of Optimization.

During the summer of 2016, he worked as a research scientist intern at Amazon.com (Seattle) in the Supply Chain Optimization Technologies team. Using Machine-Learning techniques, he worked on predicting the fulfillment cost and developing a prototype to grant a fast and accurate access to future shipping cost estimates.

Gregory D. Abowd is Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. Prior to joining Northeastern in March 2021, he was a Regents’ Professor and held the J.Z. Liang Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also served as Associate Dean of Research and Space for the College of Computing. Abowd is an internationally renowned and highly cited scientist, well known for his contributions in the general area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and specifically for his groundbreaking research in ubiquitous computing.

In more than 26 years at Georgia Tech, Dr. Abowd initiated bold and innovative research efforts, such as Classroom 2000 and the Aware Home, as well as pioneering innovations in autism and technology, health systems, CampusLife, and a joint initiative with engineering in computational materials. He was on the founding editorial board of IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine, and was founding Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in HCI and The Proceedings of the ACM in Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies. He also founded the non-profit Atlanta Autism Consortium in 2008 to serve and unite the various stakeholder communities in Atlanta connected to autism research and services.

Dean Abowd’s contributions to the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing have been recognized through numerous awards. In 2008, he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. That same year, he was inducted into the ACM CHI Academy, the most prestigious honor for researchers in HCI. In 2009, he received the ACM Eugene Lawler Humanitarian Award for his work in autism and technology. As of 2020, he graduated 30 Ph.D. students, 20 of whom have gone on to successful careers at top universities around the world.

Dr. Abowd received the degree of B.S. in Honors Mathematics in 1986 from the University of Notre Dame. He then attended the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom on a Rhodes Scholarship, earning the degrees of M.Sc. (1987) and D.Phil. (1991) in Computation from the Programming Research Group in the Computing Laboratory. From 1989-1992 he was a Research Associate/Postdoc with the Human-Computer Interaction Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York in England. From 1992-1994, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Software Engineering Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Faith Sumpter (she/her/hers) joins the IPaT team as the program and operations manager. Faith joins the team from Georgia Tech’s Institute Diversity department where she provided support for several programs including Employee Resource Groups, Inclusive Leaders Academy, and Transformative Narratives. Prior to that position, she worked within student activities, orientation, and leadership programs at UNC Asheville, Chattahoochee Technical College, and Agnes Scott College. Faith received a bachelor of arts in Spanish from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and a master of arts in higher education and student affairs from the University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT. Outside of work, she is an active member of her community and serves as the member-at-large for diversity and inclusion for the Wesleyan College Alumnae Association Board of Managers.

Marcia Chandler has been with Georgia Tech for more than 15 years, with assignments in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Tennenbaum Institute before joining IPaT. Her responsibilities include purchasing and p-card administration, travel and expense processing, student hiring and HR actions, and asset management. She also assists researchers with Georgia Tech’s rigorous research faculty promotions process and coordinates IPaT Research faculty promotions peer review committee activities. Finally, she compiles and edits the IPaT Weekly Highlights. A native of Florida, Marcia holds a master’s degree in public administration from Kennesaw State University, a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Florida A&M University, and she is a 20+-year member of the Grammy award-winning Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus.

I am an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Before joining Georgia Tech, I spent two wonderful years at Virginia Tech as a faculty member. Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Visual Computing Group at Harvard University, and received my Ph.D. from Human-Centred Computing Department, Monash University, Australia.

My research encompasses a wide range of topics within the fields of Visualization (VIS), VR/AR, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I actively contribute to these communities and regularly publish my work in leading venues such as IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, IEEE TVCG, EuroVis, and IEEE VR. I am honored to have received three best paper honorable mention awards, notably from IEEE VIS in 2016 and 2022, as well as ACM CHI in 2021. I also serve as a program committee member for several prestigious conferences in my fields, including IEEE VIS 2022/23/24, ACM CHI 2023/24, and IEEE VR 2022/23/24.

Celeste Mason is a research scientist II at the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). After completing her Masters of Human-Computer Interaction at Georgia Tech (and previously, a Bachelor’s in Materials Science and Engineering), she worked as a researcher/developer at a wearable computing startup and universities in Northern Germany. Research projects included design and development of technologies for intelligent assistance in physical training for older adults, with an emphasis on realistic intelligent virtual agents and dynamic user feedback; creation of a multi-modal dataset for action recognition and semantic/hierarchical structure discovery, with the goal of enhancing cognitive robotic planning algorithms; user interfaces, wearable, and tangible systems for the “Workflow Editor” graphical procedural customization system for order-picking and other industrial processes (now part of Teamviewer); and the collaborative research projects “Multimodal Algebra Lernen (MAL)”, a tangible mathematics educational system; and “Be-griefen”, an experimentation XR educational system for physics and electronics instruction.
 

Some of the projects Celeste has worked on at Georgia Tech include PopSign (an American Sign Language vocabulary learning mobile game - the initial prototype was the basis of her Masters project), along with the Passive Haptic Learning and Rehabilitation project (PHL/PHR Gloves help to teach the "muscle memory" of how to play piano melodies without the learner's active attention and may aid those recovering from stroke injury and other conditions improve sensation/dexterity in their affected hands), the FIDO project (tangible and wearable systems for working dogs), and the CHAT project (wearable computers used by dolphin researcher). Prior Materials Science research projects focused on design, fabrication, and characterization of piezo-electric nanogenerators, bio-inspired nanomaterials and optically transparent, electrically conductive nanoparticle/polymer composites. Her current research focuses include educational games, tools, and outreach (especially in the STEM space); assistive technologies for health, education and industry; environmental sensor systems for community-driven sustainability; and wearable (AR/XR) and implantable technologies for health, productivity, and quality-of-life/well-being. Celeste continues to pursue technology transfer efforts for these projects (PHL Gloves and PopSign in particular) with the goal of building up and refining these research prototypes toward viable products that can significantly improve and enrich users’ daily lives.

Research Interests:

• Educational and behavior-change technologies, serious games
• Wearables/XR, multimodal interaction
• Assistive technologies
• Sustainability in computing

Yanni Loukissas is an Associate Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. His research is focused on helping creative professionals think critically about the social implications of emerging technologies. His forthcoming book, All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society (MIT Press, 2019), is addressed to a growing audience of practitioners who want to work with unfamiliar sources both effectively and ethically. He is also the author of Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture (Routledge, 2012) and a contributor to Simulation and its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he co-coordinated the Program in Art, Design and the Public Domain. He was also a principal at metaLAB, a research project of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He has taught at Cornell, MIT, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Originally trained as an architect at Cornell, he subsequently attended MIT, where he received a Master of Science and a PhD in Design and Computation. He also completed postdoctoral work at the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society. Website:  http://loukissas.lmc.gatech.edu/

Jim Budd brings 15 years of academic and research leadership in human-centered, interactive product design, as well as two decades of corporate design experience to the school. Most recently, he was associate professor of industrial and interaction design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where he headed the Wearables and Interactive Products Lab. Jim Budd is the past chair of Georgia Tech's School of Industrial Design.