Brian K. Shepard
Dr. Brian K. Shepard, is Assistant Professor of Pedagogical Technology in the Flora L. Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California, where he teaches courses in Composition, Music Theory, Orchestration and Music Technology at both the undergraduate and graduate level. He also chairs the Thornton School of Music Technology Committee
Dr. Shepard's pioneering research into the musical capabilities and opportunities of Internet2 has brought him international recognition and he has been featured on CNN's Technology Week In Review and NPR's Morning Edition, as well as in Discover and Symphony magazines.
Shepard is a composer of both acoustic and electronic art music as well as an arranger and orchestrator of "Symphonic Pops" charts. His works have been performed by the Oklahoma City Philharmonic Orchestra, the Charleston (SC) Symphony Orchestra, Trio Contraste, the Margarita Baños-Milton dance ensemble, and by numerous faculty and student ensembles from colleges and universities across the country. As a result of collaborations with dancers, he has been exploring the concept of interactive dance music. One of his recent forays into this area, HyperLinx, uses infrared sensors placed around a stage to detect a dancer's movements. This information is then used by a computer running a program written by Dr. Shepard in MAX to create a musical accompaniment to the dance. Dr. Shepard serves on the Internet2 Performance Events Advisory Committee and is a former member of the music editorial review board for MERLOT (Multimedia and Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching). He is also an audio recording "coach" for the New World Symphony in Miami Beach Florida.

Douglas E. Van Houweling
Douglas E. Van Houweling, President and CEO of Internet2, is also a Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He served as a member of the National Academies Panel on the Impact of IT on the Future of the Research University and continues to serve as a member of the Forum on IT and Research Universities. With James Duderstadt and Daniel Atkins he authored Higher Education in the Digital Age. Van Houweling is the recipient of the EDUCAUSE 2002 Excellence in Leadership Award, and currently serves on the boards of Merit Networks, Altarum, Cyber-state.org, Syntel and Adaptec.

Dr. Van Houweling played a major role in Internet development in the United States. He was Chairman of the Board of MERIT, Inc., a Michigan statewide computing network, when the National Science Foundation awarded it responsibility for operation and management of the NSFNET national backbone in partnership with IBM, MCI and the Michigan Strategic Fund in 1987. Van Houweling was also Chairman of the Board of Advanced Network and Services Corporation, a not-for-profit organization that implemented and operated the world's largest Internet backbone network from 1991 until 1995.

Van Houweling has long been active in inter-university initiatives, serving on the EDUCOM Board and playing roles in establishing numerous initiatives to establish cooperative information technology efforts among universities. He was a founder of EDUCOM's Networking and Telecommunications Task Force and the Inter-university Consortium for Educational Computing.

Dr. Van Houweling previously served as the Vice Provost for Information and Technology at the University of Michigan, where he was responsible for the University's strategic direction in the information technology arena.

Dr. Van Houweling received his undergraduate degree from Iowa State University and his Ph.D. in Government from Indiana University.

Veronika Krausas (composer)

Veronika Krausas 'works have been described as possessing an “organic, lyrical sense of storytelling [which is] supported by a rigid formal elegance, [that] give her audiences a sense that nature’s frozen objects are springing to life.”  (Globe & Mail, Canada)

She was born in Sydney, Australia and raised in Canada. She has music composition degrees from the University of Toronto, McGill University in Montreal, and a doctorate from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.  Her works have been performed in Canada, the United States, Australia, Germany (at the Darmstadt New Music Festival), the Netherlands and Romania.  She has received commissions from the Canada Council for Continuum Music and two commissions for Motion Music (Canada) including a Millennium Project Grant, several Interdisciplinary Grants from the University of Southern California Arts Initiative, and several Subito grants from the American Composers Forum.

Since 1998 Krausas has been producing multi-media presentations in Los Angeles that incorporate her works with dance, acrobatics and video presentations.  She currently teaches at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Il sole e l’altre stelle for String Quartet was finished in 2006.  The title for this work was taken from the last line of Dante’s Paradiso, “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (by the love that moves the sun and the other stars).  This work is in memory of the Canadian pianist Eugenie Ngai and written for the Calder Quartet.   Much of the melodic and harmonic material is based on Eugenie’s name. The rhythms and meter are based on her name and the Dante quote.

More: http://www.veronikakrausas.com/

Recent installation exhibitions include 'Decoding Highlights' at VTO gallery in London (2004), 'Memory Prismatic' (2003) at Ground Zero in Marina del Rey, and 'Emotion Anamorphic' (2003) at DCA gallery in Venice, California. His performances include video backgrounds for members of Cirque du Soliel, OEMA, the Debbie Allen Dance Academy, VH1 documentaries, and the Mayan Theater. He has worked closely with George Clinton, Mount Sims, URB magazine, and the Erato Philharmonic orchestra (2005) on both music videos and live performance environments.

Drummond's experimental videos have been featured in the New York International Independent Film/Video, Mill Valley, and the Williamsburg Brooklyn Film Festivals. Robert was recently featured in the Dec. 2004 issue of Res magazine for a video adventure in the Arctic and is currently shooting and editing HD for a video wall commission designed for a Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill building the City of Virginia Beach, VA.

More: http://www.robertdrummond.com

Scott Deal (percussionist and Conference Chair)
Noted as "a standout inspiration", Scott Deal is an active performer of new works. His appearances as a soloist or chamber musician include venues in London, Atlanta, Boston, Washington DC, Moscow, and at the Sub Tropics New Music Festival, May in Miami, SEAMUS International Electronic Music Conference, Northwest Percussion Festival and Percussive Arts Society (PAS) 2001 and 2005 International Conventions.  Composers whose works he has premiered include John Luther Adams, Matthew Burtner, Robin Cox, Emma Lou Diemer, David Heuser, Dorothy Hindman, Charles Norman Mason, Greg Mrytle, Nick Ramliak, Carlos Surinach, John Van der Slice and Henry Wolking.

A specialist in melding music with new technology, he is a founding member ART GRID, an Internet2, telematic performing ensemble comprised of a multi-disciplinary group of musicians, artists, dancers and actors.  In conjunction with ART GRID, he has formed one of the world’s first student telematic ensembles at UAF.  Recently Dr. Deal completed a series of articles and video demonstrations on the topic of percussion technology for the 3rd edition of Teaching Percussion by Gary Cook. In 2005 Dr. Deal launched the Alaska Summer Percussion Institute in the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, a two-week intensive of performance training in classical, world and jazz mediums.

More: http://www.uaf.edu/music/department/Deal.html

New World Symphony
The New World Symphony is dedicated to the artistic, personal and professional development of outstanding instrumentalists. The NWS fellowship program provides top graduates of music programs here and abroad the opportunity to enhance their musical education with the finest professional training. A laboratory for musical education and expression, the New World Symphony, through a wide range of performance and instructional activities, seeks to develop in participants the full complement of skills and qualifications required of twenty-first century first class musicians. Under the artistic direction of Michael Tilson Thomas, the program offers in-depth exposure to traditional and modern repertoire, with the active involvement of leading guest conductors, soloists and coaches. The relationships with these artists are extended through NWS' pioneering experimentation with distance learning via Internet2.

Violin: Piotr Szewczyk, Hannah Cho, Viola: Jennifer Richson, Cello: Naomi
Gray

More: http://www.nws.edu/

Morris Palter (percussionist)
Born in Canada, Morris was a founding member of the Juno nominated alternative rock band treble charger (RCA/BMG) from 1993 to 1996. Upon leaving the group, Morris moved the The Netherlands to study percussion at the Koninklijk Conservatorium, Den Haag, and then to California to pursue a Doctorate degree under renowned percussionist Steven Schick at the University of California, San Diego.

Morris has performed throughout North America and Europe at various festivals and concert venues. Some of these have included the Acousmania Festival in Bucharest, the Agora Festival (IRCAM) in Paris, Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the Percussive Arts Society International Convention (PASIC) 2004 and 2005, the Quincena Festival in Spain, the Music Gallery in Toronto, as well as at the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall under famed conductor/composer Pierre Boulez. He has also performed at the La Jolla Music Society’s SummerFest Music Festival, the Holland Festival, participated as a soloist at The Banff Centre for the Arts, and has appeared at the Amsterdam Percussion Festival. Mr. Palter has also recently appeared on CBC Radio's Sounds Like Canada show with Shelagh Rogers. Morris has also performed solo recitals and guest lectures at the University of Birmingham, UK, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the University of San Diego, and the University of Virginia.

More: http://www.morrispalter.com/

Amy Philipson
Amy Philipson is the Director, Video and TV Technologies, and Director, Business and Finance for the university-wide Computing & Communications organization at the University of Washington. As director of Video and TV Technologies she is responsible for the UW's extensive, award winning Television, Video production and major advanced multimedia efforts. She led the successful efforts to establish and manages the UW's two cable channels (UWTV and uw2.tv) in the greater Puget Sound metropolitan area and across the State of Washington, and has built a subscriber base of 2 million (and growing). UWTV programming has received many awards including Emmy nominations, Golden Cine, Best of the Northwest and others.

Ms. Philipson is also the founder and now Executive Director of the national ResearchChannel (aka ResearchTV) consortium, which includes many of the country's leading research universities and also key corporate research partners such as IBM. In addition to providing on-demand programming and distribution of broadcast TV materials via the Internet, as of January 2000 the ResearchChannel has a full time national channel on Echostar's consumer oriented Dish500 Direct Broadcast Satellite system which reaches many millions of citizens across the country. The ResearchChannel pioneered MPEG-2 high quality broadcast TV quality (and above) demand-video distribution services, and catalysed and produced the first real-time, and first live, high definition television transmissions over the internet. These HDTV over IP efforts included a series of record setting demonstrations in which over a billion bits per second of real-time, uncompressed studio-quality HDTV streams were successfully distributed over Internet2-Abilene, DARPA NTON, and in the first live coast to coast HDTV (also at > a gigabit) over DARPA Supernet. In November of 1999 the ResearchChannel and UCAID announced a new working group dedicated to streaming video especially very high quality pushing hard at the further convergence of television, HD multimedia, and the Internet.

Ms. Philipson holds BS and MCP degrees from MIT.