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Athomas
Goldberg
is currently a Technical Animation Director for Electronic Arts where he most recently designed and implemented all in-game interactive animated features and behavior on an unannounced original IP in the 3rd-person action title at EA's Black Box Studio in Vancouver. In this role, Athomas was responsible for all in-game animation tools, workflows and pipelines, using DICE's Frostbite 2 Game Engine, and EA's proprietary internal animation solution.
Prior to that, Athomas oversaw the research, design and development of animation & simulation tools and technologies for Electronic Arts' world-wide studios, supporting numerous next-gen game titles including: Madden, NCAA Football, NFL Street, FIFA, FIFA Street, NHL, NBA Live, NBA Street, Def Jam, Fight Night, and others. This animation solution is now in use on all EA Sports titles on PS3 and XBox 360, as well as several titles on the Wii, and has been adopted by a number of studios in the EA Games label, including DICE (who have integrated it as the animation solution in the Frostbite 2 Engine), Bioware, EALA, Black Box as well as the EA Play Label's studio in Salt Lake City.
Before joining EA, Athomas was
the Game Technologies Group Leader at Sun Microsystems, where he helped coordinate
Sun's numerous initiatives and engagements with the electronic games industry.
Prior to that,
Athomas was the Founder, President and Chief
Technology Officer for Improv Technologies, Inc, where he
led a team of 40 people in software development, sales, marketing
and business development and helped raise $8 million in private
equity financing. In addition, Mr. Goldberg was the chief
software architect and principal inventor for Improv's commercially-released
products: Cirquet,
Orchestrate3D and Catalyst.
Before forming Improv Technologies in February 1999, Mr. Goldberg
was a Research Scientist at New York University's Media Research
Laboratory, where, along with Professor Ken Perlin, he developed
the Improv
Animation System, a tool for creating lifelike
interactive animated actors for special effects, animated
films and interactive games and applications. He has presented
the animation system in many published papers and performed
demonstrations at numerous conferences and symposia, including
ACM SIGGRAPH (94-99), Hypertext 96, Lifelike Computer Characters
(94-96) and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's
Symposium on Interactive Story Systems.
His work at NYU has been described in numerous magazines,
newspapers and television programs and has been featured in
a number of books including "Digital Illusions" edited by
Clark Dodsworth for Addison-Wesley, "The Interactive Book"
by Celia Pearce for Macmillan Technical Publishing, "Hamlet
on the Holodeck" by Janet Murray for The Free Press and the
new edition of "The Animation Book" by Kit Laybourne for Three
Rivers Press, a division of Crown Publishing.
Prior
to his work at NYU, Mr. Goldberg spent several years as an
Illustrator, an Off-Broadway theatrical lighting and set designer
and a multimedia installation and performance artist during
which time he studied painting at the Art Students League
in New York and L'Ecole Albert Defois in France.
Before
beginning his professional career, Mr. Goldberg studied Film
and Television Production at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts
during which time he also worked for Edwin Schlossberg Inc.
assisting in the development and testing of large-scale multi-user
interactive games and applications.
Mr. Goldberg is a member of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI), the International Game Developers Association (IGDA)
and the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Groups in
Graphics and Artificial Intelligence (ACM SIGGRAPH and SIGART).
He is on the AI Standards Committee of the IGDA as part of the Working Group
on Finite State Machines, and is a member of the editorial board for ACM
Computers in Entertainment.
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