As Executive Director of the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, David brings nearly two decades of Operations experience with a focus on producing large-scale, international competitions and events. Over the course of his ten plus years at XPRIZE, David has orchestrated an eclectic slate of incentivized prize competitions, with topics ranging from Moon exploration (Google Lunar XPRIZE) to seawater surface oil recovery (Oil Cleanup XPRIZE), which leverage emerging technologies and a crowd-source platform to drive technological breakthroughs and positive social impact.
William R. Provancher is the founder and CEO of the startup Tactical Haptics, which is focused on adapting his prior tactile feedback research to create the haptic illusion of force feedback in a motion controller, but without the limitations of traditional force feedback devices. Tactical Haptics restores the user’s sense of touch to bring virtual reality (VR) experiences alive and allow users to actually feel the stretch of their bow, inertia and impact of their sword, kick of their gun, or tug of a fish. The company has received SBIR (small business innovative research) grants from both NASA and NSF and is venture backed. Most recently the company has created a new cylindrical controller form factor, SaberGrip™, and created new VR experiences focused on sword fighting and fishing for VR arcades as well as medical and industrial VR training.
David Parisi is an Associate Professor of Emerging Media at the College of Charleston whose research explores the past, present, and possible futures of touch technologies. His book Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/archaeologies-of-touch) (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows how electric shock, experimental psychology, cybernetics, aesthetics, telemanipulation robotics, and virtual reality each participated in a reconceptualization of touch necessary for its integration into contemporary computing technologies. His writing on tactility has appeared in publications such as Logic, TechCrunch, Open!, ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories, New Media & Society, Convergence, and Game Studies. Parisi is also a member of the recently established Haptics Industry Forum.
Prior to joining XPRIZE, Jacquelyn Morie spent 13 years as a Sr. Research Scientist at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), which she helped found. While there, she created novel VR telehealth and educational activities using her deep understanding of art, computer animation and human behavior to enhance engagement with these programs. As Founder and Chief Scientist of her company, All These Worlds, LLC, Morie continued this work for private and government clients, including NASA’s Behavioral Health & Performance Research group, for whom she developed the ANSIBLE Project, which studied how to mitigate psychological issues that might imperil future long duration space travelers. She served as a member of the DARPA Information, Science And Technology think tank from 2011 through 2015, and lectures extensively on how technology will affect our future selves and humanity. Dr. Morie is also an ACM Distinguished speaker, and holds masters’ degrees in both Fine Art and Computer Science. She also holds a doctorate in immersive technologies from the prestigious SmartLab Program through the University of East London.
Jeremy Fishel is the founder of Tangible Research which delivers consulting soluitions in haptics and robotics, co-founder/former-CTO of SynTouch which manufactures biomimetic tactile sensors and provides solutions for quantifying touch, and professor of Mechatronics Engineering at CSU Chico. Jeremy received his PhD from the University of Southern California (’12) for his work on tactile sensing and material characterization, which formed the foundation of SynTouch’s core business in quantifying touch. He has been recognized by Popular Mechanics as one of the 2013 Innovators, and accepted as a delegate of the Academy of Achievement under the personal recommendation of General David Petraeus for his efforts developing prosthetic hands with tactile reflexes. Under Jeremy's technical leadership SynTouch has been recognized as a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum, an RBR50 company by the Robotics Business Review, and has established a growing list of blue-chip customers adopting SynTouch’s technology. Recently, he has lead a coalition of interdisciplinary teams across multiple high-tech companies to create the world’s first high-fidelity tactile telerobot that allows the operator to control and feel a pair of robotic hands like they were their own. Jeremy’s professional interests are in pioneering applications of robotic dexterity and perception using the sense of touch and he has launched Tangible Research to pursue those objectives.
Nicholas Colonnese is a Research Science Manager at Facebook Reality Labs Research, working on novel interfaces for mixed reality. He leads a multi-disciplinary team which includes researchers with expertise in haptics, soft robotics, computer vision, machine learning, estimation, optimization, and functional garments and textiles. His research interests center on how the intersection of a broad range of academic disciplines: from haptics, to sensor fusion, to human computer interaction paradigm design, can define and then improve mixed reality interaction in the coming revolution of augmented and virtual reality. He holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.
Bio Coming Soon
Nicholas Colonnese is a Research Science Manager at Facebook Reality Labs Research, working on novel interfaces for mixed reality. He leads a multi-disciplinary team which includes researchers with expertise in haptics, soft robotics, computer vision, machine learning, estimation, optimization, and functional garments and textiles. His research interests center on how the intersection of a broad range of academic disciplines: from haptics, to sensor fusion, to human computer interaction paradigm design, can define and then improve mixed reality interaction in the coming revolution of augmented and virtual reality. He holds a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.
David Birnbaum is a designer, inventor, and public speaker on the topics of emotional design, embodied communication, and immersive entertainment. Currently Head of Design Strategy and Outreach at Immersion Corporation, he’s spent the last 15 years designing apps, games, phones, wearables, musical instruments, automotive interfaces, medical devices, ads, and XR with haptic technology. Since feeling haptics for the first time in 2005, David has believed the power of touch technology, becoming more and more pervasive, is poised to change our society and our world. He wants to help make that happen.
Hong Z. Tan has conducted haptic research for about 30 years. Her MIT doctoral dissertation was the first study to demonstrate an information rate of 12 bits/s with a multi-finger haptic display that was developed as a tactile aid for the hearing impaired. Tan received her Bachelor's degree in Biomedical Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, P.R. China. She earned her Master and Doctorate degrees, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is currently a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering with courtesy appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. Tan was a recipient of the prestigious US National Science Foundation's Early Faculty Development (CAREER) Award, and she was a Chinese National Natural Science Funds’ Distinguished (Overseas) Young Scholar. She has served on numerous program committees, was a co-organizer of Haptics Symposium from 2003 to 2005, Founding Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics in 2006, Editor-in-Chief of the World Haptics Conference Editorial Board from 2012 to 2015, and co-chair of the World Haptics Conference in 2015. Tan has served on many journal editorial boards and received a Meritorious Service Award from the IEEE Transactions on Haptics in 2012. From 2011-2015, Tan was a Visiting Researcher, then a Senior Researcher and Research Manager at Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing, China.
Since 2007, Stella has been working as a development engineer at BMW, with a focus on haptics and future interior concepts.
J. Edward Colgate received a Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering in 1988 from M.I.T. He subsequently joined Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he is currently the Allen and Johnnie Breed University Design Professor and a member of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Dr. Colgate's principal research interests are haptic interfaces and human-robot interaction. He and collaborator Michael Peshkin are the inventors of a class of collaborative robots known as “cobots” and a suite of technologies for bringing programmable haptic feedback to touch screens. Dr. Colgate was the founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the National Academy of Inventors, and a member of the Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame. Dr. Colgate was one of the founding co-directors of the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University where he directed the Master of Science in Engineering Design and Innovation, which combines graduate-level engineering courses with a broad exposure to human-centered design. In addition to his academic pursuits, Dr. Colgate has founded three startup companies the most recent of which, Tanvas Inc., is commercializing innovative surface haptics technologies.
