Hank Gerba, PhD
Hank is a media theorist with expertise in the philosophical study of computation, AI, aesthetics, and narrative. They received their PhD from Stanford University in June of 2024.https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/in00000106660 While at Stanford, Hank held fellowships at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI),https://hai.stanford.edu the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA),https://cesta.stanford.edu and ran the Stanford Humanities Center's Digital Aesthetics Workshop, a working group which has hosted more than 50 leading scholars of computational media.https://shc.stanford.edu/stanford-humanities-center/workshops/digital-aesthetics Their writing has been published in Real Life and Media-N, and is forthcoming elsewhere.
Outside of academia, Hank has over a decade of experience exploring and explaining the bleeding edge of technology with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at the University of Southern California, a think tank created by George Lucas.https://cinema.usc.edu/etc/ ETC is a neutral zone that brings together senior executives from the entertainment industry, and is tasked with looking around the corner. It produces demonstrator projects which are individually crafted to provide executives an experiential glimpse of the future, coupled with comprehensive post-mortem reports. In probing the future, these demonstrators are trusted weather vanes that significantly shape the industry.
At ETC, Hank co-produced the Emmy-nominated VR Short Wonder Buffalo: The VR Experience (the first VR film to combine volumetric video and photogrammetry),https://vimeo.com/224432295 wrote for, operated, and upgraded the capabilities of Sophia the Robot,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia has written multiple white papers charting the evolving relationship between AI and narrative for studio CTO's, and is currently Lead Researcher of the Universal Character Model (UCM) project. Sponsored by Amazon Studios, Disney, NBCUniversal, Epic Games, and Dolby, the UCM project is charting the future of author-centric systems that combine AI and narrative storytelling.
Download a general résumé/academic CV.
Contact at hank.g@icloud.com.
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