Giovanni Castillo
Giovanni Castillo is a creative and conceptual thinker. He is passionate about trans-disciplinary collaborations and the power they have to create startling new ideas in education and research. Castillo considers himself a technologist, artist, architect, and educator. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, (SAIC) and a Master’s degree in Interior Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. After graduating from SAIC, Castillo was hired to work for NASA where he collaborated with scientists to produce mission animations and real-time simulators for astronaut training and air traffic controllers. His work at NASA Ames earned him an ID magazine award in Industrial Design for robotic concepts for the Personal Satellite Assistant, a mobile assistant for astronauts. Castillo’s work spans multiple fields and has received awards in lighting design, installation art, painting and drawing, interactive media, video and film, architecture and immersive media. He sees spatial computing as the ultimate opportunity to create rich interdisciplinary collaborations.
Research Keynote
Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn
Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn (Ph.D., Stanford University) is an Associate Professor at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia, and founding director of the Games and Virtual Environments Lab. Her main program of research investigates how interactive digital media such as virtual and augmented reality transform traditional rules of communication and social interactions, looking at how virtual experiences shape the way the way that people think, feel, and behave in the physical world. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health and is published in numerous top-tier outlets in the fields of communication, health, and engineering. She is the recipient of the Mary Alice Shaver Promising Professor Award from the American Academy of Advertising, the inaugural Early Career Award from the National Communication Association's Health Communication Division, and the Krieghbaum Under-40 Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.