Workshop Chair
Dr. Shadnaz Asgari
Associate Professor, CSULB
Member of the Organizing Comittee
Dr. Shadnaz Asgari
Associate Professor, CSULB
Dr. Bo Fu
Assistant Professor, CSULB
Dr. Alvaro Monge
Professor, CSULB
Dr. Birgit Penzenstadler
Assistant Professor, CSULB
Dr. Debra Richardson
Professor, UCI
Dr. Wenlu Zhang
Assistant Professor, CSULB
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Kristina Winbladh Nasr
Technical Program Manager, Google
Kristina Nasr is a Technical Program Manager at Google where she combines her skills in software engineering and project management to drive large cross-functional projects. She was previously a Director of Software Engineering at comScore where she was responsible for applications processing 65 Billion records daily and led a team of software engineers in developing big data applications on the distributed computing platform Hadoop. Before then, Kristina was an Assistant Professor at the University of Delaware where she built up a research lab in software engineering, secured public grants and funding, taught several courses in the M.S. program, and was granted a Young Faculty Award by DARPA. She earned her Ph.D. from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UCI in 2010 and her B.S. from the Computer Engineering and Computer Science Department at CSULB in 2004. On her free time, Kristina enjoys hiking, camping, paddle boarding, and skiing, or anything that involves being active and outside.
Dr. Anahita Shayesteh
Senior Staff Engineer, Samsung
Shayesteh is a senior system architect and researcher at Samsung Memory Platform Lab in San Jose, California. She works on storage solutions for datacenter applications, leveraging new technologies in flash and SSD design. Anahita received her PhD in Computer Science from UCLA where she focused on Computer architecture. Prior to Samsung she was a research scientist at Intel Labs where she worked on various topics in architecture including CPU, GPU, Cache and Interconnect design.
Dr. Constance Steinkuehler
Professor, UCI
Constance Steinkuehler is a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine where she researches the cognitive and social aspects of multiplayer online videogames and esports. Her current projects include mixed methods research on the NASEF high school esports league, quantitative study of esports in higher education, and advice on parenting gamers. She chairs the Annual Esports Conference at UCI and the UCI Esports Program Task Force for Diversity and Inclusion.
Constance formerly served as Senior Policy Analyst under the Obama administration in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, advising on games and digital media. She is the founder and former President of the Higher Education Video Games Alliance, an academic organization of game-related programs in higher education. She currently serves on the advisory board for the UCI Esports Program and Chairs the UCI Diversity and Inclusion in Esports Task Force. Constance’s research has been funded by the Samueli Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Cambridge University. She has published over ninety articles and book chapters including three special journal issues and two books. She has worked closely with the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Education on special reports relate to videogames, and her work has been featured in Science, Wired, USA Today, New York Times, LA Times, ABC, CBS, CNN NPR, BBC and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Constance has a PhD in Literacy Studies, an MS in Educational Psychology, and three Bachelor Degrees in Mathematics, English, and Religious Studies. Her dissertation was a cognitive ethnography of the MMOs Lineage I and II where she ran a large siege guild. Her husband Kurt Squire is an educational game designer and scholar. They live with their two little gamers in Southern California.
Google Mentors
Dr. Stephanie Chan
Google A.I. Resident
Stephanie is an AI Resident at Google. The AI Residency is a one-year program research training program designed to jumpstart a career in machine learning research. Stephanie studied physics and brain & cognitive sciences as an undergrad at MIT, then completed her PhD in neuroscience at Princeton University. There, she studied the algorithms the brain uses for organizing its memories and for reinforcement learning/decision making. After the PhD, Stephanie led machine learning teams at startups in Boston/Barcelona and Hong Kong, before arriving at Google.
PhD Students
Nailah Alhassoun
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Clara Marques Caldeira
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Aisha Chen
Department of Computer Engineering & Computer Science
California State University, Long Beach
Mayara Costa Figueiredo
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Leiny Garcia
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Qing Han
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Sharin Jacob
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Shiva Jahangiri
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Samantha McDonald
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Juliet Norton
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Ha Nguyen
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Tera Leigh Reynolds
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Phanwadee (Gift) Sinthong
Department of Informatics School of Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Alex Sanchez-Stern
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of California, San Diego
Master Students
Erik Arriaga, CSULB
Echelle Burns, CSULB
Jared Coleman, CSULB
Sogand Kavianpour, CSULB
Website Administrator
Anthony Martinez, CSULB