Metaverse: Security, Ethics, and Privacy

We are excited to announce that two keynotes will take place during the Metaverse Symposium

Dr. Dmitriy Babichenko, Clinical Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh

Lisa Sibilia, co-CEO, Youtopian, LLC

Bios:

Dr. Dmitriy Babichenko is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems (DINS) at the School of Computing and Information (SCI) at the University of Pittsburgh. He has extensive industry experience in educational software design and development, IT project management, and decision support systems. Since joining SCI in 2013, Dr. Babichenko has taught courses in programming, data analytics, games design, and immersive media/extended reality engineering.  In 2015 he founded a SCI’s Learning Technologies Laboratory, a lab dedicated to research related to learning technologies, serious games, and immersive media.

Lisa Sibilia, co-CEO, Youtopian, jolts innovation impact across the global landscape of enterprise & education. Youtopian was named to ‘honor the person in front’ after one of her greatest mentors in life, Gene Columbus, former Disney Edutainment executive and legend. She is leading Artificial Intelligence and eXtended Reality (AI XR) custom innovation and digital engineering to enable organizations to simplify complexities to drive meaningful business outcomes. She is spearheading top universities shifting to hybrid course design & experiential innovation, such as, labs online, neuroscience XR, and cross-field applications. She is redefining industries leveraging how she reverse-engineered life itself to learn 10x faster and build innovation that matters, such as, custom, smart IoT. She integrates Total Physical Response and behavior analytics to impact the future state of the 3D Web. She is a former Disney Company cast member with family roots back to Original Imagineering. She measures life by the lives impacted along the way and is actively mentoring 700+ Stanford LEAD students & executives across 60+ countries.

 

Presenters

Jesse Schell is the CEO of Schell Games, a team of more than one hundred thirty people in Pittsburgh, PA who strive to make the world’s greatest educational and entertainment games, including Yale Medical’s PlayForward: Elm City Stories, HoloLAB Champions, the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood games, and Happy Atoms. Schell Games also creates pure entertainment content, such as the award-winning VR game I Expect You To Die and Until You Fall, a critically-acclaimed VR sword fighting game. Jesse also serves as a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology at Carnegie Mellon University. Jesse has worked on a wide variety of innovative game and simulation projects for both entertainment and education, but he is best known for his award-winning book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, now in its third edition, and his predictions about the future of gaming technology. He is a previous chair of the International Game Developers Association and former Creative Director of the Disney Virtual Reality Studio.

Rachael Lally, MPH, CIP is the Executive Director of the Penn State University Human Research Protection Program. She is responsible for a newly combined team of 27 IRB professionals who manage the oversight of all human subjects research across Penn State’s many campuses, including the College of Medicine. Rachel completed her undergraduate degree in Behavioral Neuroscience and Education at Colgate University, earned a Masters degree from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health, and has over 19 years of experience working in human subjects research.

Like many IRB professionals, Rachel fell into IRB work early in her research career. When the grant money supporting her research coordinator position ran out as the tuition benefits of a university job became clear, Rachel found herself working for the IRB to pay for grad school. Three years and one MPH later she was not only done with school but also on her way to becoming an IRB expert. Since then Rachel has participated in many local and national meetings related to improving the way IRBs do their work, with a focus on protecting human subjects while moving science forward

Sean Wybrant currently crafts tomorrow’s heroes in his classroom by teaching students to critically think and solve problems through computer science and video game development with an emphasis in creating augmented, virtual, and mixed reality experiences. At the beginning of his career, he taught kids about English literature and language arts, and in 2010 earned a position as a Lead Educator in his district’s Next Generation Learning work. In 2012, he began his work in Career and Technical Education. Sean’s work with immersive technologies and service learning led to his selection as the 2017 Colorado State Teacher of the Year, and he has also led numerous professional development sessions around Next Generation Learning strategies, technology use in the classroom, personalized learning, and service learning over his career. He has presented at the International Society for Technology in Education annual conference, Colorado Education Initiative Showcase, and Denver Comic Con. In 2022 Sean cofounded Crafting Heroes, LLC with one of his former students, with the goal of inspiring and empowering tomorrow’s heroes to build the future.; Sean serves as the Chief Education Officer of Crafting Heroes while continuing to teach full time at William J. Palmer High School.

Carrie Brown holds a master’s degree in Statistics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Building upon an educational and research background in bioinformatics, she has expertise in facilitating computational research. She has assisted researchers in identifying appropriate computational solutions and leveraging institutional, commercial, and national resources such as XSEDE and the Open Science Grid. She also has extensive experience in developing and delivering computational training and works closely with the Carpentries as a certified Instructor and Instructor Trainer.

Zac Zidik (Lead Creative at CIE) has over 20 years of media production experience. With a foundation in design, his skill set includes 3D modeling and animation, UI/UX design, and programming in multiple languages. An experienced educational game designer, Zac has evolved with technology and is now focused on creating, and helping others to create, engaging and meaningful immersive experiences. Learn more about his work here.

Pejman Sajjadi (Post Doc / xR Developer at CIE) is a Postdoctoral researcher in the department of geography. His primary research interests are digital game-based learning (serious games, educational/edutainment games, and simulations), immersive technologies (virtual/augmented reality), adaptive learning systems (learner-centered design, personalization, and adaptation), embodied conversational agents, and human-computer interaction.

Erica Krieger (xR Developer at CIE) is a data visualization specialist with interests in promoting research and education. She graduated from Penn State with a Master’s of Biotechnology, during which she provided innovative solutions for displaying research in the fields of ecology, virology, and epidemiology. Her background in graphic design coupled with strong technical foundations in the life sciences has yielded a unique perspective for overcoming the challenges of information communication.