As a consultor, advisor and leader in AI technology, be it CGI or Robotics, I focus not only on adopting and inventing state-of-the-art and world-class solutions, technologies and methodologies, but also on aligning new and existing technology with the given technical requirements, product and business goals and strategy, so that AI can be used to power products and a Cost-Effective, Revenue-Focused and User-Experience-driven manner.

How? I am an eclectic scientist and engineer focused on intelligent, interactive technology, with a strong academic background, and additionally self-taught through my passion of animation, photography, cinema, music, sound design and nearly all other artful expressions. Through the years I have been building a unique career, focused on creating intelligent artificial creatures that exhibit the illusion of life.

My major work has been on robots and digital people that interact with people, in various contexts such as entertainment, education, personal- or labour- assistance, etc. Within those fields, I have accumulated over 13 years of expertise in animation systems and interactive technology for autonomous social agents.

My creatures aren’t lifelike solely by design or by movement. That’s why I always start any presentations by saying:

Animation isn’t just about motion - it is about expressing thought, identity, emotion and intention.

I strive to understand and create the basic underlying mechanisms that allow an artificial intelligence to portray its existence through an artificial embodiment, be it virtual or robotic, abstract or human-like. In essence, I’ve been architecting and engineering Autonomous Characters.

During my PhD I brought together the fields of computer animation and robotics to create social, interactive robots, that look and feel as animate and alive as the characters I love from movies. That meant linking artificial intelligence and interactive robotics control, with character animation, and human-robot interaction. I called it Robot Animation, which became the cornerstone of my career.

In the past five years I’ve focused on virtual characters by performing and leading R&D on autonomous, lifelike animation of Digital People (DPs), at Soul Machines, including developing their automomous gesturing capabilities, their ability to connect socially and emotionally with users, and making them more capable and better integrated with new technologies such as LLMs, and new markets such as digital celebrities and influencers, metaverse and alikes. Such DPs can be authored and personalized for various tasks, goals, environments, audiences and services. They present a real-time, lifelike performance through a properly crafted balance between biologically-inspired behaviour systems, with both artistically-directed and generative motion and behaviour, all integrated into a complex AI ecosystem of linguistic and conversation models and multimodal interactive technologies.

My connection with the arts is very personal, and is driven in most part by my passion for animation, but also for digital film and photography, three particular fields on which I am mostly self-taught and also explore as a hobby. These creative abilities and understanding, allied with my technical background, have allowed me to work in teams with both artists, roboticists, social-scientists and software-engineers, to bring them together and build a bridge between all those worlds.

By working together and in multi-disciplinary settings, we are better able to materialize our imagination into real, physical achievements, and to push all those fields forward into the future.