Imperial College - GaME 07 Introduction
I’m at the Games and Media 07 event at Imperial College today, but unfortunately just for the morning sessions.
Fairly packed out - today’s event is free registration, and we’ve probably got over a hundred people in the lecture theatre.
First up, an introduction from Paul Kelly, group leader of Software Performance Optimisation at Imperial.
Nine technical talks, two from Imperial academics, two from Imperial graduates, demos of research projects, and looks like we’ve got a crowd of around 300 today (50% industry). Last year’s event had 180-odd attendees. Games developers, Microsoft, IBM, press, funding agencies… Yum. Networking!
This year’s event led by John Cass and Julia Zanghieri, Bizdev for Creative Industries and Marc Hull (essentially in an AI group, doing bioinformatics, but doing a games PhD) and Paul Kelly. Lots of time for demos today, too.
Some notes about Imperial: 12k students, about 4k postgrads, 39% outside the EU. 6k staff, 3k active researchers, and turnover of £480m per year and £180m in research grants.
Department of Computing: 60 academic staff, half of the work is research, but everything is research-led. Many undergrads get involved in resesarch through final year projects and summer internships. Encouraged to check out http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/teaching/projects/DistProjects.html
Some interesting research: software performance optimisation, reconfigurable supercomputing, medical imaging and robotic surgery, multimodal HCI, body sensor networks, content-based networking (network middleware infrastructure for MMOGs), SLURP - “Sound Languages underpin Reliable Programming” - Haskell for game prototyping, knowledge representation for AI and Creativity in automatic theory formation (and art).
But: there’s no Games resarch group, but there’s quite a lot of games-relevant research going on. Imperial want to build an understanding of research that can make a difference in games, and an understanding of how to work with the industry. Oh, and how to find a cool games job, and how a university software engineering degree can help (and how that teaching programme can be improved).
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