Week 10 Guest Commentator – Dr. Kimberly Voll

Dr. Kimberly Voll joins us next week as we explore social issues, including violence and sexism in games. Kim holds a PhD in com­puter sci­ence, and an hon­ours degree in cog­ni­tive sci­ence. She spent six years as fac­ulty at the Uni­ver­sity of British Colum­bia, and has taught every­thing from soft­ware engi­neer­ing to video-game devel­op­ment to health infor­mat­ics. Her areas of specialization include arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and language modelling, user expe­ri­ence, game design, software engineering, and innovative edu­ca­tional methods and curriculum design. Pas­sion­ate about video games since the age of two, Kim runs the Van­cou­ver chap­ter of the Global Game Jam (one of the largest chap­ters in the world), helps coordinate FullIndie (a meetup for Vancouver independent game developers), and is a huge sup­porter of the Van­cou­ver video-game com­mu­nity and beyond. Whenever possible, Kim does volunteer consulting for new startups or small companies, including crowdsourced funding strategies and design/development strategies for games and apps. On the side, Kim is a 2D con­cept artist, occa­sional graphic designer, a writer, and is cur­rently devel­op­ing a game for iOS.