Organizers
Benjamin A. Watson
Associate Professor, NC State University
Moderator
Benjamin A. Watson is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. His Visual Experience Lab focuses on the engineering of visual meaning, working in the fields of graphics, visualization, interaction and user experience. He has worked for decades on visual technologies and their relationship to human performance, perception and experience. Watson co-chaired Graphics Interface 2001, IEEE Virtual Reality 2004 and ACM Interactive 3D Graphics and Games 2006, and was co-program chair of I3D 2007. He is an ACM and senior IEEE member, with a doctorate from Georgia Tech's Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center.
Josef Spjut
Senior Research Scientist, NVIDIA
Josef is a Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA working to improve computer response times for esports and video games. A lifelong gamer, Josef found great joy in the social and competitive aspects of video games, which inspired his Ph.D. research on ray tracing hardware at the University of Utah. Prior to joining NVIDIA Research in 2015, he spent 3 years as a Visiting Professor in the department of Engineering at Harvey Mudd College.
Caitlin McGee
Co-Owner and Performance and Esports Medicine Director, 1HP
Director of Performance, XO Academy (Red Bull)
Caitlin is a physical therapist (PT, DPT) with a background in neuroscience and exercise/sport science. She is the Co-Owner and Performance and Esports Medicine Director of 1HP, an organization that provides health and performance services to esports players, teams, and organizations. She is also Director of Performance at XO Academy under the Red Bull umbrella. She has been working in the esports medicine sphere for 5 years.
Amine Issa
Founder, Mobalytics
Amine earned his doctorate at the Mayo Clinic researching the extremes of human performance, with his findings powering development of technology in mobile health and remote monitoring. He also spent decades playing video games and competed professionally for a couple years. He came to believe that there are many broader lessons in performance that can be learned from the arena of esports. He was able to channel both his performance and gaming passions to found Mobalytics, a performance assessment and optimization platform for gamers.
Wayne Mackey
Founder, Statespace
Wayne earned his doctorate at NYU and followed that with a post-doc at NYU's Computational Neuroimaging Lab, where he studied human attention, memory and decision-making. He employed neuroimaging, eye-tracking, transcranial magnetic stimulation and virtual reality to advance his research. In 2017, he founded Statespace, bringing his neuroscience expertise together with data science and video game technology to realize standardized performance analytics in training, with a particular focus on esports.