S.N. Jayaram (“Jay”) Murthy

S.N. Jayaram (“Jay”) Murthy received the B.E. degree in Electronics and Communications in 1967 from Engineering College, Kakinada, India, and the M.Tech degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1969. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1974 for his work on visual texture analysis and synthesis.

Dr. Murthy joined Central Michigan University (CMU) in 1987 and is currently a Professor in the Department of Computer Science. He served as the Chairperson for five years. Before joining CMU, he worked as a regular faculty member at the Indian Institute of Science, Wayne State University, and the University of South Carolina. His publications, research, and teaching interests are in the areas of data/text mining, multimedia, pattern recognition, and computer vision.

Dr. Murthy spent his sabbatical at the University of California, San Diego during1994-95. The city of San Diego was rapidly gaining a reputation at that time for being known as "The Mecca of Multimedia". During that period, Dr. Murthy had a chance to interact with prominent researchers and professionals who specialized in the design of multimedia titles including video games. Upon his return to CMU, he developed a sequence of undergraduate courses in multimedia design. Enrollment in these courses has seen steady growth in the past two decades.

Patrick (Pat) Kinnicutt

Patrick (“Pat”) Kinnicutt received the S.B. degree in Civil Engineering in 1989 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During this time, he got involved in an undergraduate research project helping to develop the Engineering Geology Educator, a multimedia educational courseware built on top of the AthenaMuse 2 authoring platform. He received the S.M degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1991 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he continued work on the Engineering Geology Educator and developed a parser to decouple the content and the user interface. He received his Ph.D. in Information Technology in Civil Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995 in a collaborative project with the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI) and the Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory (IESL) developing a 3D geologic modeling application, NOMAD.

Dr. Kinnicutt worked as a senior software engineer for Schlumberger Technology Corporation between 1995 and 2003, where he worked on developing 3D geologic modeling software and real-time hydraulic fracture simulation and monitoring software.

He joined Central Michigan University (CMU) in 2003, initially with a joint appointment in Geology and Computer Science. He transitioned into a full-time position in the Department of Computer Science when he became the department chair, from 2014-2020. Dr. Kinnicutt currently is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at CMU, and performs research in brain-computer interfaces, scientific visualization and modeling, and machine learning. He is a faculty advisor for the department’s computer science, information technology, and cybersecurity programs, as well as for the interdisciplinary multimedia design, game design thinking and data engineering minors.

Taylor Ripke

Taylor Ripke received the B.S. degree in Computer Science in 2016 from Central Michigan University. During this time, he was involved with various undergraduate research projects focusing on video game design and accessibility. He received the M.S. degree in Computer Science in 2018 from Central Michigan University for his work in autonomous cooperative navigation using a robot and drone.

Taylor lectured at Central Michigan University between 2019 and 2020. His courses were primarily focused on the multimedia track, which consisted of introduction to and advanced multimedia design, and computer game design. These classes were project based where an emphasis was placed on designing hands-on, fully immersive, 2D and 3D projects in Unity. Other courses included object-oriented design and scripting languages. In 2020, Taylor shifted focus to industry work where he remains currently active.