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Contact Information
Prof. Bruce Blumberg
The Media Lab, MIT
77 Mass Ave. NE18-5FL
Cambridge MA 02139
bruce@media.mit.edu
617 253 9832 (office)
617 225 2009 (fax)
617 253 7441(Aileen Kawabe, the person who really runs things in my group)
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How to Find Us
The Synthetic Characters Group is located on the 5th Floor of 1 Cambridge Center.
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Quick Bio.
Bruce Blumberg is an Associate Professor of the Media Arts and Sciences at the Media Lab of MIT. He is also head of the Synthetic Characters Group and Asahi Broadcasting Corporation Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, as well as co-director of the Digital Life Consortium at the Media Lab.
Using animals such as dogs as his model, his group’s research goal is to build animated characters that possess the same type of every day common sense, empathy, and ability to learn that one finds in animals. His group are frequent contributors to the interactive venue of conferences such as SIGGRAPH, including: AlphaWolf (SIGGRAPH 2001), sheep|dog: Trial By Eire (E3, 2001), (void *): A Cast of Characters (SIGGRAPH 1999), Swamped (SIGGRAPH 1998) and ALIVE (SIGGRAPH 1995 & 1993.) He is a frequent lecturer in courses on ALife techniques for interactive characters, including those offered at SIGGRAPH and GDC and has published widely on the topic in conferences such as SIGGRAPH, AAAI, CHI, AA, ABA and SAB. He is frequently invited to give key note talks and most recently took part in the Distinguished Presentation series of this year’s IJCAI conference. He has appeared on television and most recently his work was featured on the season premiere of Scientific American Frontiers hosted by Alan Alda. He is an avid dog trainer and competes successfully in the sport of agility.
Before coming to the Media Lab, he held positions at Apple Computer and NeXT Inc. Blumberg holds a B.A. in Economics from Amherst (1977), an S.M. in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management (1981), and a Ph.D. from the program in Media Arts and Sciences (1996).
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