Darkstar

ETC Project Advisor:

Jesse Schell

Asst. Professor of Entertainment Technology

Jesse Schell is on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches classes in Game Design, and leads several projects, including GameInnovation.com, a systematic study of the history of videogame innovations, and Hazmat: Hotzone, an anti-terror team training game for the nation’s firefighters. Jesse is also the CEO of Schell Games (an independent game studio in Pittsburgh: www.schellgames.com), and the Chairman Emeritus of the International Game Developers Association. In 2004, he was named one of the world’s Top 100 Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT’s magazine of innovation. Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, he was the Creative Director of the Disney Virtual Reality Studio, where he worked and played for seven years as designer, programmer and manager on several projects for Disney theme parks and DisneyQuest, as well as on Toontown Online, the first massively multi-player game for kids. Before that, he worked as writer, director, performer, juggler, comedian, and circus artist for both Freihofer’s Mime Circus and the Juggler’s Guild. He is presently trying to cram everything he knows into a book called The Art of Game Design.

Sun Microsystems Client Representative:

Jim Waldo

Distinguished Engineer
Project Darkstar Project

Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, where he is the technical lead of the Darkstar project. Prior to (re)joining Sun Labs, Jim was the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java. While at Sun, Jim has done research and product development in the areas of object-oriented programming and systems, distributed computing, and user environments. Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text and internationalization. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first OMG CORBA specification. He edited the book “The Evolution of C++: Language Design in the Marketplace of Ideas” (MIT Press), and was one of the authors of “The Jini Specification” (Addison Wesley). Jim is an adjunct faculty member of Harvard University, where he teaches distributed computing in the department of computer science. Jim received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He also holds M.A. degrees in both linguistics and philosophy from the University of Utah. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.