Gordon W. Braudaway
Mr. Braudaway, a Research Staff Member, has been involved in image processing for the past seventeen years. His activities include Print Verification through high speed image analysis; “soft-proofing,” the color-correct display of pre-press images on LCD and CRT displays; digital image and document security using visible and invisible image watermarking methods; and the development of numerous image filtering and imager calibration algorithms. Mr. Braudaway is a Senior Member of the IEEE and an IBM designated Master Inventor. He holds a B.S.E.Ph (Engineering Physics) from University of Colorado, an M.S.E.E. (Electrical Engineering) from University of Washington, with additional post-graduate Study at Syracuse University.

Will Byles
Will Byles has been an actor, producer, designer, animator and director in film and theatre. He had his own film company, HarumScarum Films up until 1998 when he went to set up Aardman Animation's CG department where he also worked as Creative Director. In 2001 he went to set up another CG Department in London at 601 until he started work as Art Director on Battlefield Modern Combat with EA.

Dr. Sebastien Deguy
Dr. Deguy is the CEO and Founder of Allegorithmic, the company behind the ProFX procedural map authoring and rendering system. Dr. Deguy has a computer science background with a specialization in mathematics, random processes, simulation, computer vision and image synthesis. He is also an award-winning director and producer of traditional and animated short films.

Stefanus Du Toit
Stefanus Du Toit is the Vice President of Development and a cofounder of RapidMind Inc. He leads the development and architecture of the RapidMind Development Platform. In 2004, together with Prof. Michael McCool, he founded RapidMind Inc. to commercialize their research efforts to provide a simple way to efficiently program multi-core processors such as GPUs and the Cell BE. He has an extensive background in compiler technology, graphics, systems programming, parallel programming and GPGPU. Mr. Du Toit holds a BMath Computer Science from the University of Waterloo.

István Fábián
István joined the Technology Group of SCEE in 2005, supporting PS3 developers full time. Special interests include CPU architectures, multi-processing, multi-threading, OS, optimisation techniques, emulation, good algorithms and OOD/OOP.

Gilles Fleury
Gilles is the Lead Technical Artist at Allegorithmic and the #1 specialist of MaP Zone 2, the authoring tool of ProFX, the novel procedural techniques proposed by Allegorithmic based on the FX Maps concept. Besides being a gaming nut and game industry cool news seeker, Gilles constantly invents new visual effects and rendering styles to be used by artists for their upcoming creations.

David Freeman
David bridges the world of games and film. Along with his game design and writing consultancy The Freeman Group (www.freemangames.com), he is working or has worked as a designer and/or writer on “Prey,” “Van Helsing,” “Shark Tale,” “Terminator: Redemption,” “Marc Ecko’s ‘Getting Up – Contents Under Pressure,’” “Enter the Matrix,” the upcoming “Brooktown” for Konami, and many others. David is the author of the influential book, “Creating Emotion in Games,” with a foreword by Will Wright. He has been a frequent speaker at many game publishers, and at game conferences around the world including numerous past GDCs and DICE. As a writer and producer, David has had scripts and ideas bought or optioned by MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Castle Rock, and many other film and television companies. He also teaches “Beyond Structure” (www.beyondstructure.com), L.A.’s most popular screenwriting workshop (also offered in New York & London). David welcomes your correspondence at david@freemangames.com.

Duncan Frostick – Combat Code Ninja
Duncan graduated from Birmingham way back in July 2005, and somehow got a job as a Junior Programmer with Ninja Theory three weeks later. Raw with withdrawal from student life, he was gently introduced to the combat system. After a while their relationship blossomed enabling him to shed his 'Junior' tag and become a fully fledged combat/gameplay/occasional physics/bosses ninja. When he's not introducing new and interesting bugs to Heavenly Sword, he likes to pretend he's not a geek - but with over 40 'iconic' t-shirts, and more computers than fingers, he pretty much traps himself in the stereotype.

Michael Khaimzon
Bio to follow.

Scott Kirkland
Scott Kirkland is Technical Director and a founding member of Evolution Studios. His games industry career began in 1996 at Digital Image Design where he pioneered the integration of 3D hardware acceleration with their world renowned combat flight simulation games. At Evolution, Scott developed highly optimised audiovisual solutions for the hugely successful and critically acclaimed World Rally Championship series of PlayStation2 games. More recently, he has lead Evolution's experienced programming team to realise MotorStorm for the global launch of PlayStation3 in parallel with strategic development, external liaison, management and recruitment responsibilities.

Nina Kristensen – Chief Development Ninja
Nina entered the games industry joining Millennium Interactive as a graduate artist. She spent two years modelling and animating MediEvil's quirky in-game characters. At Sony, Nina worked as a Lead Artist later to become Art Manager for the Cambridge Studio. Working to strict deadlines, she recruited and deployed art resources across internal and external projects, including the BAFTA award winning MediEvil II. Upon founding JAM (Just Add Monsters) in 2000, Nina was primarily responsible for project management and art direction as well as company strategy. JAM soon recruited an exceptional Lead Artist for Kung Fu Chaos and Nina was able to focus on the role of Producer, delivering the title on time and on budget. She strongly believes in working closely with publishers maintaining an open and candid dialogue throughout the development process. Since Just Add Monsters became Ninja Theory in 2004, Nina now holds the role as co-founder and Chief of Development.

SaiTong Man – Combat Design Ninja
SaiTong joined Ninja Theory, formerly Just Add Monsters, a little over four years ago leaving behind a life of design engineering to work on the company’s first game, Kung Fu Chaos. When Just Add Monsters (who reformed as Ninja Theory) began working on Heavenly Sword, he was given the task to design and develop a new combat system. Over the last few years of development, working with a close knit team of programmers, designers and animators, SaiTong has designed and combined the features and content in order to implement the combat system for the currently highly anticipated next-gen title Heavenly Sword. SaiTong’s favourite word is potato.

Igor Makaruks
Igor Makaruks joined the SCEE Technology Group since summer 2005 after completing his Computer Science Degree in Riga, Latvia. Igor's primary role is supporting PlayStation Portable and PlayStation 3 developers by creating graphic related sample code to improve game performance. He is also involved in consultancy and training developers throughout Europe and actively participates in public game developer conferences worldwide.

Jamie Macdonald
Jamie Macdonald is Vice President of Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios. Jamie started his career in the entertainment business running various new technology projects for BBC TV and Radio. He joined Criterion Software in 1995 heading up their games division before moving into a broader role involved in the early planning and R&D for RenderWare. He joined SCEE in 2001 as the founding Director of SCE London Studio where he has been responsible for the EyeToy, SingStar and Getaway franchises. Following the formation of SCE Worlwide Studios in late 2005, Jamie is now jointly responsible for Product Development strategy and management based in Europe together with the Division's other Exec Board members.

Guy Midgley – Lead Animation Ninja
Guy became embroiled in the games industry more than six years ago, joining the fledgling Just Add Monsters as a Character Artist. Guy was responsible for the unique design and creation of the characters in Kung Fu Chaos. Along with a small team of animators he created all the character content in the game. Following this, Guy took the role Lead Animator on Heavenly Sword. His role comprises of guiding a significant team of highly talented animators in the production of the title’s stunning character animations. When not animating, Guy spends his remaining hours wishing he owned a DeLorean.

Peter Molyneux
Peter is one of the computer games industry's most articulate and eloquent speakers on computer games development. He co-founded Bullfrog Productions in 1987 and created a new genre of computer games, 'the god game' with the release of POPULOUS. Since then, Peter has been responsible for a string of massive selling games including POWERMONGER, THEME PARK, MAGIC CARPET and DUNGEON KEEPER. In 1997 Peter left Bullfrog Productions to form Lionhead Studios. Lionhead has released two games, BLACK & WHITE and FABLE, and is working on four new titles. He recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Abertay and was inducted into the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.

Andrew Oliver
Andrew Oliver is co-founder and co-owner of Blitz Games and took on the role of Technical Director when he and his twin brother Philip started the company in 1990 following nearly ten years of designing and writing highly successful video games. In August 2002 he was appointed Chief Technical Officer and is now responsible for all aspects of the company's game development direction and future technology strategy. He ensures that the company's reputation for high quality development standards, prompt delivery and the creation of cutting edge in-house tools is consistently maintained.

Eric Reinhart
Eric Reinhart works as an Application Engineer within the Consumer Software Enabling Team for Intel GmbH based in Munich, where he supports games and creativity application developers in Europe. In his 20+ years in the software development business he enjoyed working on games, serious simulations and amongst other things, room sized 3D visualization systems.

Harvey Smith
Harvey Smith is a game designer and creative director who has been making games professionally since 1993. Currently, he works for Midway as Studio Creative Director in Austin. He worked at Ion Storm (Austin) from 1998 to 2004, acting as project director of Deus Ex: Invisible War and lead designer on the award winning Deus Ex. (Deus Ex was given the BAFTA in 2000.) Prior to Ion Storm, he worked at Multitude, an Internet startup in San Mateo, CA. There he was lead designer of FireTeam, an innovative tactical squad game that was one of the earliest video games to feature Internet voice-communications between players. Smith started his career at Origin Systems, working there for almost four years. Harvey also won the Game Design Challenge at GDC 2006 with his game "Peace Bomb," modeled after the Nobel Peace Prize.

Wayne Stables
Wayne began his career at WETA Digital where he worked on The Frighteners, Contact, Lord of The Rings Trilogy. In 2003, he left WETA for PDI Dreamworks and Shrek 2. Wayne joined Electronic Arts (UK) in 2004 and immediately went to work as Lighting Lead on Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter: Order of the Phoenix.

Jonathan Story
Jonathan Story is an Application Engineer working within the Consumer Software Enabling team at Intel GmbH in Munich. The main focus of his work is supporting game developers in Europe. With around ten years of experience in the games industry Jonathan has a wealth of programming knowledge in the fields of 3D, optimization and multi-threading.

Chris Williams
Project Lead
LucasArts, A Lucasfilm Ltd. company

As Project Lead at LucasArts, Chris Williams’ primary responsibility is to deliver a high-quality title on time and on budget. He manages a team and guides the development effort, also interfacing with other departments regarding the project, both internal and external. After graduating from Cornell University with a B.Arch. in architecture in 1998, Williams began his professional career at LucasArts as a 3D Modeler and has stayed with the company ever since. Williams has contributed to seven LucasArts releases, including: Star Wars Obi-Wan (3D Modeler), Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds (Lead Artist), Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns (Lead Artist), Star Wars Republic Commando (Lead Artist, Line Producer, then Producer), LEGO Star Wars: The video game, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (DS), and Star Wars: Empire at War (Supervising Producer). He is currently working as the Project Lead on Indiana Jones 2007, which will involve frequent interaction with Industrial Light & Magic.