Tech Talks

Lecture Series

Join the University of Utah School of Computing and The City Library for a lecture series about the impact of computer science on our society and culture.

Thu, Mar 21, 7pm 

The POWDER Mobile and Wireless Living Laboratory, presented by Kobus Van der Merwe

With more mobile devices than people in the world, we certainly take mobile phones and the wireless services and applications they enable for granted. However, this increase in the number of mobile devices strains the capabilities of current mobile networks, e.g., insufficient capacity for users wanting to stream high definition video, dropped or failed calls at venues with many users etc. Further, emerging uses of wireless networks, like connected vehicles and the Internet of Things, require fundamentally different capabilities of these networks, like high reliability, low latency and the ability to scale to billions of devices.

Kobus Van der Merwe is the Jay Lepreau Professor in the School of Computing and Director of the Flux Research Group at the University of Utah. He joined the University of Utah in 2012 after fourteen years at AT&T Labs - Research. He does networking systems research in a broad range of areas including mobile and wireless networking, network evolution, network security and cloud computing. He is the Principal Investigator and Director of the POWDER project, one of the newly selected NSF wireless research platforms.

Thu, Apr 18, 7pm

Toward a Science of Game Design, presented by Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera

Game development is costly, technically challenging, and poorly understood. Increased demand for games as a form of entertainment has motivated research into technology to help ameliorate the burden involved in development. This technology unfortunately has the potential to create more problems than it solves. In this talk, I will argue that this increased demand should motivate more research into human-centered game design, involving both artifact and person. This research requires computationally modeling our human intelligence, as part of an agenda that seeks to codify the precise interplay between a person's cognition (an inner environment), the game's controls (an interface), and a fictional universe (an outer environment); the interplay is concerned with attaining design goals by adapting the inner environment to the outer environment. I will present examples of this agenda as embodied through my own work and identify key challenges that I think need to be addressed in service of establishing what I call a "science of game design.”

Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera is an Assistant Professor of the School of Computing and the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Program at the University of Utah, where he directs the Laboratory for Quantitative Experience Design. His research focuses on the design of games, systems where users direct an unfolding experience by taking on ludic/dramatic roles. 

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