Room 400 (Balcony Theatre) John Gibbs, Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre & Film Studies, Faculty Fellow in The Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and newly-minted President and CEO of Artimatic, Inc., will discuss how he took his interdisciplinary research at the intersection of 3D Animation and Machine Learning, and, with the help of his co-founders, turned this into a commercial business. John will briefly discuss his background interests and why 3D animation and AI/Machine Learning seemed a viable research path, and how he created an interdisciplinary class in the spring of 2020 to explore this very area of research. Next, John will describe how he and his co-founders--one graduate student in Theatre & Film Studies, and two recent graduates of the IAI program--decided at the end of the class to pursue the research project and see if it could be made commercially viable. John will then discuss how UGA’s Innovation Gateway, and their i-Corps program, which he took during the fall of 2020, were instrumental in helping him and his colleagues to determine a path to creating a commercial entity. And finally, John will discuss the patent that his team has applied for, and how their new company, Artimatic, Inc., came to be. Was any of this a straight and easy path? Not at all! Is it possible? Yes indeed! And could you yourself do it too? Almost certainly! Friday, October 22, 2021 - 12:40pm
