ED HOOKS

Author of the famous book “Acting for Animators” 

Ed Hooks was a professional actor for 30 years before becoming one of the most respected acting teachers in the world. He has taught Acting for Animators for most major animation studios and video game companies, including Disney Animation, Valve Software, Ubisoft, Warner Brothers, Sony and Electronic Arts, and has been a featured
speaker at many international animation festivals and conferences.
He teaches at schools such as Ringling College of Art and Animation(Florida) and Filmakademie Baden-Wurtemberg (Germany).

STUART SUMIDA

Biology professor, “Jurassic World” film consultant, and recipient of the CSUSB Outstanding Professor award

He is also one of the most sought-after anatomy consultants to film animators, working on more than 60 feature-length films, including “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King,” “Lilo and Stitch,” the first Harry Potter film and “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Several of the films have been nominated for the Academy Awards Best Animated Feature of the Year such as “How to Train Your Dragon,” “Ratatouille,” “Surf’s Up,” “Bolt” and “Kung Fu Panda.”

He also served as a consultant to animators to video games such as Horizon Zero Dawn. More recently he has lent his anatomical and paleontological expertise to “Life of Pi,” academy-award winning “Zootopia,” “Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom” and DreamWorks’ “Abominable.” He has also worked on television projects, including helping with the animal characters in the HBO/BBC series “His Dark Materials.”

TONY TARANTINI

Professor, Sheridan College, Canada

SAYED NADIM AKHTAR

Co-Founder Director, Digitoonz, India

With 20 years of experience in Animation industry, Nadim is the Co-Founder of Digitoonz. Digitoonz is one of the largest animation studio from India and is globally renowned. He is an MBA and have done courses of Mass Communication, Business Management and Animation as well. He is also a Co-Founder of Dikshant ITI Collage and Layford International School.
With the passion for technologies and education, he has a great skill of developing resources from the industry.
He takes care of the entire Digitoonz’s team and plays around with the new technologies and process for education and production.

SARASWATI ‘VANI’ BALGAM

Creative producer, Creator and Consultant

JULIA GOGA – COOKE

CEO Academy of Design Thinking

Julia Goga helps companies grow. Academic, design thinker, entrepreneur and a storyteller. 

She is an academic, journalist, design thinking coach and entrepreneur. Julia leads Gconsultancy Innovation, an IOEE academy of entreprise and innovation, and AIA network helping companies grow through innovation.

Julia server at the BBC for 16 years in various on-air and senior editorial and leadership positions.

Julia’s passion for learning has taken her to CSM and London Business School to study Design Thinking Innovation Management and Creating New Ventures, d.School in Stanford on Creating Innovation Spaces and Innovation Games, and MIT to study Collaborative Innovation Networks.

NASTARAN SHIVAEE

Creative Director/Art Director from University of Tehran

Nastaran has over 10 years of experience in creating and designing. She commenced her professional career as a freelance graphic designer & illustrator in 2009. She equipped herself with the nitty gritties of brand guidelines and its consistency.

She is highly skilled in client and vendor relations and negotiations, and an eye to detail to know the clients and their products. She focuses to build a happy and healthy long-term partnership with clients by providing unique insights and quality designs. She has a quality industrial practice of graphic design with her own colorful touch to each project she has executed.

PETER CHANTHANAKONE

Associate Professor at Zayed University

3D Animation Short Film Director | Expertise in the entire animation process from preproduction to post production | Directed and produced 15 3D animated short films (2006-2018) which have been selected and screened @ in 70+ International film festivals + 2 awards | Presented at over 50 International venues, from Universities (Sheridan College – Canada), Film Festivals (VIEW animation – Italy) and Conferences (Siggraph Asia – China)
His Specialties include virtual team collaboration, animation outsourcing, pipeline production. He believes and practices the global exposure through work, travel and education. He envisions a world with creative interconnectedness of design economy.

ARVIND SINGH

CEO at Aleph Pte Ltd. Singapore 

Arvind founded Aleph in year 2006 with a vision of “a place in which creative individuals from different backgrounds and with various skill sets come together and form synergetic alliances to tackle creative projects and generate ideas”.

His abilities to build rapport and trust among diverse people in different locations, has led to establishing strategic relationships with clients such as SUNGARD, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and many other multinational clients in different domains.

He specializes in Idea generation, Concept articulation & visualization, Concept prototyping, Interface Design, Interface usability & Cross channel digital interfaces.

Dr. AYSEGUL LIMAN KABAN

Lecturer at Bahcesehir University

She is the consultant of the Media Literacy Association in Turkey. In 2020, she finished her Ph.D. degree in the field of Educational Technologies. She studied the effects of electronic reading experiences (printed book, on-screen reading, gamified reading, and personalized reading) and the influence of reading comprehension, motivation, and retention. Between 2013 and 2016, she was the editor of the IATEFL TEASIG Newsletter. She has been the editor of IATEFL Learning Technologies since September 2016. In 2013, she completed her master’s degree in Emotional Contagion in Teacher-Student Relations at Marmara University.

Dr. PIERRE PEPIN

Assistant Professor & International Artist at NYIT, US 

Dr. Pierre Pepin has been a transdisciplinary educator of visual arts and technology for over thirty-five years. He has experience in Media as Researcher, Writer at Asia Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States. A French-Canadian, he earned his Master of Education degree at Université Laval and taught at the high school and university levels in Canada. He earned his doctorate in Art and Media from Université du Québec à Montreal with a thesis on innovative approaches to teaching media art, with special focus on art educators in K-12. Also, own a studio in Graphics Design, as a Designer for 25 Years. Dr. Pepin is currently an Assistant Professor at NYIT New York in the Media Art and Design Global Program located in Amman, Jordan.

PRASAD KANTAMNENI

Founding Partner at UXReactor

He is the founding partner at UXReactor, and manage the UXD Academy – Design School – with a vision of creating Best of Breed design experiences and talent.

Prior to UXReactor, he worked for 20+ years with cutting edge companies such as Yahoo! and Honeywell. While at Yahoo!, he was the principal architect of the Eye-Tracking platform, and was responsible for significant user experience and revenue improvements.

One of the achievements he is most proud of is using research to build a case and drive the launch of the search assistance feature (also known as search suggestions) at Yahoo!. This helped Yahoo! be the first search engine to deploy the Search Assistance feature — a feature that touches almost every Internet user today.

Dr. MOHSEN ROSHANIAN RAMIN

Director of Allameh Tabatabai University (ATU) 

Dr. Mohsen Roshanian Ramin has PhD in Educational Technology; his field of study is serious game and eLearning. He is Director of Allameh Tabatabai University (ATU) Virtual Education System.

Research is one of the most important topics in higher education. Some researches should be carried out in order to identifying and resolving the research problems and selecting qualified people. The aim of the present study was to focus on the research self-efficacy in the psychology and educational sciences graduate students. The research was conducted by using the descriptivesurvey method. The statistical population was consisted of all MA students in psychology and educational Sciences at the Tehran Kharazmy University in 2011-2012 semesters. 120 students were selected by simple random sampling method.

KONSTANTINOS KALEMIS

Instructor at National Centre for Local Government and Public Administration – Greece in e-learning and IoT

Intructor at Council of Europe in Inclusive and Distance Education.

Mr. Konstantinos has extensive expertise in Social Web/Web 2.0, Collaborative Technologies, Information Management, Change Management, KM Strategies, Evaluating and Monitoring KM.

He specializes in Introduction of New Technologies as an alternative teaching process and the design of new curriculum plans for the open and d-Learning. The education of immigrant ethnic minorities focusing on the gifted and talented students and aim to advance the theory and technology of natural language and knowledge processing, especially semantic analysis that bridges the gap between language and knowledge, by the novel use of both machine learning and inference methods

BIKRAMJIT SINGH

General Manager at Virtualsoft Technologies

Currently he holds a total experience of 20 years. He is working in Virtualsoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Chandigarh as of now as General Manager after working for quite a long time as Project Manager.  He also mentors Graphic Design and UI with Chandigarh Design School, Chandigarh. He is also one of the nominated expert for world skills competition.

He guides students post they have entered and opted for a course in the respective field regarding the career to choose by minutely keeping a progression on the student during their course time by polishing the skill and henceforth the path to their destination.

PARMINDER SINGH

SENIOR ANIMATION MENTOR 

He is a Design and Animation Professional with over 18 years of Industry Experience. He has been simultaneously active both in production and education/training since the onset of his career. During his career, apart from successfully handling countless Animation and Design projects for clients around the Globe, he has mentored and trained thousands of students to build successful career in creative fields. For education management also he has been rewarded at National level.

His most enjoyable venture has been the attempt to bring feature quality 3D character animation training to North India on the lines of International Schools very early on before 2010. His experiments with the training of high end 3D character animation were highly acknowledged, his students were directly picked by the top employers of India including Xentrix, Technicolor, MEL, DQ entertainment, Prime Focus, Pranas. Technicolor even awarded the best learner’s award to one of his student among all the freshers they hired.

Neelu Kapoor

Director at SXILL

She has been totally immersed in bringing Skill based education to the masses since 1996 with single-minded dedication. She understands the ins and outs of franchise model of business and its shortcomings when applied to the business of education. Keen to take bigger challenges that face the Indian Education while keeping abreast of changes in education pedagogy across the world.

SXILL is the culmination of her decades of work in the field of Skill based Education. It tries to overcome every hurdle and constraint that she met during delivering education under a franchise system (which is tweaked to never go above a threshold as it is meant for mass consumption).