Hank holds a PhD in Media Theory from Stanford University, earned in June of 2024.https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/in00000106660 Their specializilization is interdisciplinary, spanning the philosophy and history of computation, AI, aesthetics, and narrative. 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.
Hank has over a decade of experience exploring and explaining tomorrow's 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 unique "no guns saloon" tasked by senior executives in the entertainment industry to look around the corner whenever industry-wide technical challenges arise. It produces demonstrator projects which are individually crafted to provide 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 and has written multiple white papers charting the evolving relationship between AI and narrative for studio CTO's. Currently, Hank is advising the production of two demonstrators designed to pioneer generative AI workflows in film, and is 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, steerable systems that combine AI with narrative storytelling.
hank.g@icloud.com
general résumé/academic CV
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