Panels:

 

Driving Privacy to the Forefront of Intelligent Reality

Organizer and Moderator:
     • Nicholas Napp, Xmark Labs

Panelists:
     • Katina Michael, Arizona State University
     •
Angelo Ferraro, University of South Carolina
     • Lauren Reid, The Privacy Pro

Abstract: With our rapidly growing digital footprints, there has been a lot of talk regarding privacy of individuals. Intelligent Reality is bringing an added layer of complexity, with many technologies like wearables, Digital Twins, and IoT fusing the physical world with digital spaces, with more data collection and real-time analytics. Promoting and operationalizing privacy are paramount as Intelligent Reality and technologies continue to evolve. Join us as we explore privacy solutions and challenges, and the balancing act between trust and consumers’ desires for applications and services.

Persistence of Intelligent Reality Environments and Metaverse


Moderator
:
     • Roberto Saracco, IEEE New Initiative Committee Lead and IEEE Digital Reality Co-Chair

Panelists:
     • Tom Coughlin, Coughlin Associates
     • Tom Furness, University of Washington (UW), Seattle, Washington
     • Yu Yuan, IEEE Board Director-Elect and IEEE Standards Association President-Elect

Abstract: The Metaverse is the latest technology buzzword that has captured the public’s attention. Everyone is trying to define Metaverse but a key differential aspect of the “Metaverse” from “virtual worlds” is persistence. Supporting a persistent experience and environment requires advancements in computation, storage/memory, communications, machine intelligence and other technologies. There are also ethical, social, and economical questions that need to be addressed to ensure these technologies can contribute positively to the human experience. Join this panel as they discuss the challenges in supporting a persistent intelligent reality and metaverse environment.

Representation and Accessibility in the Metaverse

Moderator:
     • Tara Collingwoode-Williams, Goldsmiths University

Panelists:
     • Albright Enyioha, Sustainable Games
     • Ben Glover, Wimbledon University of the Arts London
     • Lisa Izzouzi, University College London
     • Zillah Watson, University College London

Abstract: The Metaverse is an exciting concept that has inspired new ways of thinking about how we engage with immersive technologies. Though it’s still too early to have a consensus on what will underpin the foundations of this space, as a unique platform for social interaction, it’s important to address matters of accessibility and representation in its formation. Our aim for this panel is to bring together experts in the XR field to help highlight the important considerations in designing and building toward equitable and representative Metaverse platforms, by having an open discussion on the challenges and consequences of present barriers and their potential solutions.

Panelist and Moderator Details:

Organizer and Moderator: Tara Collingwoode-Williams, Goldsmiths University

Panel: Representation and Accessibility in the Metaverse

Bio-sketch: Tara is a Lecturer and Researcher at Goldsmiths University teaching Unity-based XR development. Over the years, her interdisciplinary profile has enabled her to work and collaborate with many organizations in relation to her research, such as UCL, Great Ormond Street Hospital, George Mason Serious Games Institute, and Meta. She is currently finishing her MPhil/Ph.D. within the Intelligent Games, Game intelligence program (IGGI) at Goldsmiths, specializing in Avatar Embodiment and Social Interaction in immersive Virtual Reality, and is fascinated by the incredible opportunities that these technologies provide.

Panelist: Tom Coughlin, Coughlin Associates

Panel: Persistence of Intelligent Reality Environments and Metaverse

Bio-sketch: Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates is a digital storage analyst and business and technology consultant. He has over 40 years in the data storage industry with engineering and senior management positions at several companies. Coughlin Associates consults, publishes books and market and technology reports (including The Media and Entertainment Storage Report and an Emerging Memory Report), and puts on digital storage-oriented events. He is a regular storage and memory contributor for forbes.com and M&E organization websites. He is an IEEE Fellow, IEEE President Elect in 2023, Past-President of IEEE-USA, Past Director of IEEE Region 6 and Past Chair of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Section, Chair of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley and is also active with SNIA and SMPTE. For more information on Tom Coughlin and his publications and activities go to www.tomcoughlin.com.

Panelist: Albright Enyioha, Sustainable Games

Panel: Representation and Accessibility in the Metaverse

Bio-sketch: Albright is a Digital Twin Engineer, XR Developer, and Energy Professional who combines cross-industrial experiences through research, development, and prototyping. Her work benefits engineers, XR technology enthusiasts, and business professionals, by providing access to research work, training, and cultivating a creative community. She is also the founder of Sustainable Games, an EdTech company that focuses on raising the next generation of XR developers in Africa, to learn, build, and scale XR solutions.

Panelist: Ben Glover, Wimbledon University of the Arts London

Panel: Representation and Accessibility in the Metaverse

Bio-sketch: Ben Glover is a deaf video designer and creative captioner who uses interdisciplinary skills in both creative and technical fields typically informed by his background in theatre, film and computing. He is a recent digital Fellow of the Royal Shakespeare Company for his research on creative captioning and has previously received the Mead Fellowship award for his Virtual Reality project, Simple Misunderstanding, which was an arts installation on experiencing deafness. He is also a member of the Immersive Captions community group which aims to determine and publish best practices for access, activation, and display settings for captions with different types of Immersive Media – AR, VR & Games.

Panelist: Angelo Ferraro, University of South Carolina

Panel: Driving Privacy to the Forefront of Intelligent Reality

Bio-sketch: Angelo Ferraro currently holds a Research Fellowship, as well as Research Assistant, PhD Candidacy positions, and formerly an Instructor of Record in the Department of Electrical Engineering, at the University of South Carolina. He holds a Master of Engineering in Electrical Engineering concentration in Power Device Physics, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering concentration in Instrumentation, and a B.S. in Civil Engineering concentration in Structures and Material Science, with minors in Arts and Architecture, and extensive post graduate research in Biomedical Engineering applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) in medical imaging.

His experience includes Visiting Scientist with the Office of Naval Research, and Department of Energy program consultancy, in addition to research, executive, and managerial positions at startups, mid-sized companies, as well as multinationals: Harris Semiconductor, in the Power R&D Laboratory, and General Electric at the Corporate R&D Center. Additionally, successfully served for several years as an industry turn-around consultant to faltering second stage companies. His broad interdisciplinary education and experience in business, finances, energy, instrumentation, and smart distributed control, including some of the first commercial AI applications has provided unique opportunities to investigate and apply human rights-based ethics.

Awards include R&D-100 publications republished in IEEE text. This work consists of service on
standards, technology, and educational development committees and currently serves on several working groups and IEEE Societies, including the IEEE Privacy Initiative, and Chair of the IEEE P2895 Responsible Trading of Human Generated Data Working Group, Vice Chair of IEEE P2863 Organizational Governance of AI, Vice Chair Best Practice Guide to Developing Ethically Aligned Standards, and Vice Chair of IEEE Metaverse PAR Study Group.

Panelist: Tom Furness, University of Washington (UW), Seattle, Washington, USA

Panel: Persistence of Intelligent Reality Environments and Metaverse

Bio-sketch: Tom Furness is an amalgam of Professor, Inventor, Virtual Reality Pioneer and Entrepreneur in a professional career that spans 56 years. He has made notable contributions in photonics, electro-optics, human interface technology, and is considered the ‘grandfather’ of virtual reality and augmented reality. Tom earned a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Duke University and the Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Science from the University of Southampton, England. He is Professor (Emeritus) of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, Washington, USA. He is the founder of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory (HIT Lab) at UW and founder and international director of the HIT Lab NZ at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand and the HIT Lab Australia at the University of Tasmania, Launceston, Tasmania.

Prior to joining the faculty at the UW, Tom served a combined 23 years as an U.S. Air Force officer and civilian scientist at the Armstrong Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, where he developed advanced cockpits and virtual interfaces for the Department of Defense. He is the author of the Super Cockpit program and served as the Chief of Visual Display Systems and Super Cockpit Director until he joined the University of Washington in 1989.

Since the beginning of his career Tom has continued to play an active role in virtual and augmented reality development and application. In 1998 he received the Discover Award for his invention of the virtual retinal display. Tom is co-inventor of the ChromaID technology licensed to Visualant Inc. and received the 2013 SPIE Prism Award for this work. In June 2015 he gave keynote titled ‘Being the future’ at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California, where he received the first ‘Auggie’ lifetime achievement award for his 50-year contribution to the VR and AR Industries. In March 2016 Tom received the IEEE VR Career Award for his lifetime contributions to the fields of virtual and Augmented Reality and in October 2016 the Virtual Reality Foundation of Los Angeles Proto Award also for lifetime achievement. Most recently in November 2021 Tom was presented the Accenture Lifetime Achievement Award by the Academy of International Extended Reality and Elected to the IEEE VTCG Academy.

Tom lectures widely and has appeared in many national and international network and syndicated television science and technology documentaries and news programs. He has testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee. He is the inventor of the personal eyewear display, the virtual retinal display, the HALO display and holds 24 patents in advanced sensor, display and interface technologies. With his colleagues and students Dr. Furness has published over 400 papers and conference proceedings and started 27 companies, two of which are traded on NASDAQ at a market capitalization of > $ 12 B (USD). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the Computer Society and Photonics Society of the IEEE. He is the founder and chairman of the Virtual World Society, a non-profit for extending virtual reality as a learning system for families and other humanitarian applications. He has recently been named an Accenture Luminary.

Panelist: Lisa Izzouzi, University College London

Panel: Representation and Accessibility in the Metaverse

Bio-sketch: Lisa is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at University College London, UK. Her current research is centered on the social evaluation of virtual environments, with a focus on enhancing communication, collaboration, and trust formation. She has a special interest in multi-user experiences in XR for embodied humans and virtual humans. She is trying to understand individual and group behaviours within the fields of XR and HCI.

Panelist: Katina Michael, Arizona State University

Panel: Driving Privacy to the Forefront of Intelligent Reality

Bio-sketch: As Katina Michael is a Professor at Arizona State University, a Senior Global Futures Scientist in the Global Futures Laboratory and has a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence. She is the director of the Society Policy Engineering Collective (SPEC) and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society. She is a long-standing board member of the Australian Privacy Foundation.

Organizer and Moderator: Nicholas Napp, Xmark Labs

Panel: Driving Privacy to the Forefront of Intelligent Reality

Bio-sketch: As a co-founder of Xmark Labs, Nicholas is focused on the role of Digital Reality in enterprise digital transformation. He enjoys working at the intersection of strategy, technology, and corporate narrative to accelerate business growth. During his career, he has worked on a variety of projects in IoT, Virtual & Augmented Reality, and Blockchain. He has launched over 40 products across a wide range of consumer and enterprise markets. His clients have included major corporations such as AT&T, Hilti, HTC, Microsoft, Sony, and Tencent, and many smaller companies. Nicholas is also Board Chair at FabNewport, a non-profit provider of maker-centered learning programs and services for middle school and older students.

Panelist: Lauren Reid, The Privacy Pro

Panel: Driving Privacy to the Forefront of Intelligent Reality

Bio-sketch: Lauren Reid is President of the boutique privacy and data ethics consulting firm, The Privacy Pro. The Privacy Pro helps global companies implement practical solutions to protect data, comply with laws, and most importantly, respect people. Lauren has over 17 years of global privacy experience, having worked in several countries and industries. She was the Director of Data Governance and Privacy for Sidewalk Labs, Alphabet’s smart city portfolio company. She also led the National Privacy Advisory Services practice for KPMG Canada and was Senior Manager accountable for strategic privacy initiatives at Bank of Montreal, one of Canada’s largest financial institutions.

Moderator: Roberto Saracco, IEEE New Initiative Committee Lead and IEEE Digital Reality Co-Chair

Panel: Persistence of Intelligent Reality Environments and Metaverse

Bio-sketch: Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.

Moderator: Zillah Watson, University College London

Panel: Representation and Accessibility in the Metaverse

Bio-sketch: Zillah Watson is an Emmy-nominated creative leader, who led the BBC’s award-winning VR studio. She’s an expert in commissioning, creation and distribution of VR and AR and consults for organisations including the BBC, BFI and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

She recently founded Phase Space, a start-up focused on using VR to bring a step change in mental health support.

She led research on the impact of VR storytelling with Professor Mel Slater at the BBC, and was a visiting fellow at the Reuter’s Journalism Institute, University of Oxford, where she authored “VR for News: A New Reality.”

Panelist: Yu Yuan, IEEE Board Director-Elect and IEEE Standards Association President-Elect

Panel: Persistence of Intelligent Reality Environments and Metaverse

Bio-sketch: Dr. Yu Yuan, IEEE Board Director-Elect and IEEE Standards Association President-Elect, is a visionary researcher, inventor, practitioner, and entrepreneur in the areas of Consumer Technology, Multimedia/VR/AR, Connected/Automated Vehicles, IoT, and Digital Transformation. He co-founded VerseMaker, a metaverse enabling platform facilitating global collaboration and innovation on the metaverse by information exchange, expert network, and investment. He founded 0xSenses Corporation (also known as Senses Global Corporation or Senses Global Labs & Ventures in different countries), a multinational technology company specializing in Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Human Augmentation. Dedicated to “Creating Better Worlds” as its long-term vision, the company is developing technologies, infrastructures, ecosystems, and resources needed for massively multiplayer ultra-realistic virtual experiences. The company is also engaged in technology consulting, technology transfer, and system integration services to help with the Digital Transformation of its clients in various industries. It has been proactively supporting standards development for emerging technologies (VR/AR/MR/XR, Blockchain, AI, IoT, Big Data, Digital Twin, Smart Lifestyle, etc.) in collaboration with many other companies and institutions. Prior to this he worked for IBM Research as a research scientist and was a key contributor to IBM’s Cell Broadband Engine, Smarter Planet, and IoT initiative. He has been a passionate volunteer in various leadership positions at IEEE and other professional organizations. His outstanding service in IEEE standards activities at different levels (working groups, standards committees, and governance at higher levels) has been widely appreciated by standards developers, individual members, and entity members. He is also serving as Chair of IEEE Consumer Technology Society Emerging Technology Standards Committee (CTS/ETSC), Vice Chair of IEEE Photonics Society Standards Committee (PHO/SC), Secretary of IEEE Consumer Technology Society Blockchain Standards Committee (CTS/BSC), Chair of IEEE VR/AR Advisory Board, Chair of IEEE Persistent Computing for Metaverse Initiative, Member-at-Large of IEEE Consumer Technology Society Board of Governors, Corresponding Member of IEEE Technical Activities Board Committee on Standards, and Member of IEEE Strategy and Alignment Committee. He has a Ph.D., an M.S., and a B.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University.