dorkbot pittsburgh

Jia is the Director of Product Management for Dancetown, a dance-based digital fitness system developed for seniors. Using a computer and dance pads, people of all ages are able to participate in healthy intergenerational play through the Dancetown system. Jia is a Stanford University alumnus and actively supports grassroots technology efforts in the Pittsburgh area. He currently serves as Technology Director for NAAAP Pittsburgh, volunteers on the local game developers board, and helps organize the Pittsburgh PodCamp conference series. Prior to joining Touchtown, Jia was president and founder of Flying Fish Media. He has also worked for a variety of technology companies and startups such as Guru.com, Pittsburgh.com, Dreamwork Soft, Inecom Entertainment, Interactive Media Systems, Ripple Effects Interactive, and eGenesis.

For more information about dorkbot pittsburgh, please visit .

Jim is the Executive in Residence at AlphaLab, a six month program for software startups that provides companies with funding, free office space, services, and access to investors and advisors. Jim works closely with the management teams of startup technology companies to identify and address critical business issues facing those companies. Previously, Jim built and managed software businesses at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Agile Software (acquired by Oracle), and Instill Corporation (Mayfield-funded, privately held). As a management consultant at Booz Allen & Hamilton, Jim advised executive management of Fortune 500 companies on marketing, strategic planning, and organizational issues. Jim holds a BA and MA in Economics from Stanford University and an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business.

For more information about dorkbot pittsburgh, please visit .

Jennifer is a multimedia artist interested in our attempt to, and inability to, connect. Interested in "mediated exchange" – how people use technology and other means of mediation to interact – Gooch's work often looks at mediation, the mediated, and the awkward space between. She is currently working on her web and community based project, onecoldhand.com, "a site for the collection and hopeful reunion of Pittsburgh's dropped gloves." A banjo-toting singer from Dallas, Gooch received her B.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Arlington and is currently a M.F.A. candidate in Studio Art at CMU.


For more information about dorkbot pittsburgh, please visit .

Lori is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on aspects of coding through spoken and computer language in digital culture. Ambiguous visual representations of binary code are used in the Code Words body of work to create large-scale digital print installations and are performed in the Unworkings of a Binary System body of work. Ms. Hepner has been working through ideas of translation of code through performance, video, and photography since earning her M.F.A in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005. Ms. Hepner currently lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA where she holds the position of Assistant Professor of Integrative Arts at Penn State Greater Allegheny.

For more information about dorkbot pittsburgh, please visit .

Gabe is a PhD student in Computational Design at CMU. His background is in computer science and software engineering, blah blah blah. He's also a music nerd and can cook marginally well. He misses Colorado. Gabe will demonstrate FlatCAD, a system that lets you create your own physical construction kit by coding in the LOGO-like FlatLang language. Construction kits are now something you can design, if you can write a simple FlatLang program, you can design a kit and "print it out" on a laser cutter.