Biography                                                  

Athomas Goldberg is currently the Technical Animation
Director for EA's Black Box Studio where he has worked
since June of 2008 on an unannounced 3rd-person action
title. As part of his responsibilities on this project,
Athomas designed and implemented a one-on-many melee
combat system featuring highly-responsive, but tightly
choreographed attacks & hit reactions, brutal fatalities
and the use of enemies as weapons. Athomas was also
responsible, among other things, for designing and
implementing the raycast-based world navigation system
which enabled characters to jump to, climb on and vault
over, obstacles of arbitrary heights and topologies.

Prior to joining Black Box, Athomas spent 3 years as EA's
World Wide Director for Animation & Simulation Tools and
Technologies, where he was responsible for overseeing the
design, development and deployment of EA's internal
animation tools and technologies, now in use on all EA
Sports titles, as well as several titles in the EA Games
label at Black Box, DICE, EALA, Pandemic, Bioware and the
EA Play Label's EA Salt Lake Studio. This tools have been
used in the use of several of EA's highest-rated games,
including Madden, FIFA, NHL and Fight Night, as well as
dozens of others, and across all major platforms, including
PC, Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii. 

Before joining EA, Athomas was the Game Technologies Group
Leader at Sun Microsystems, where he helped coordinate Sun's
numerous initiatives and engagements with the electronic
games industry. 

Prior to that, Athomas was the Founder, President and Chief
Technology Officer for Improv Technologies, Inc, where he
led a team of 40 people in software development, sales,
marketing and business development and helped raise
$8 million in private equity financing. In addition, Mr.
Goldberg was the chief software architect and principal
inventor for Improv's commercially-released products:
Cirquet, Orchestrate3D and Catalyst.

Before forming Improv Technologies in February 1999,
Mr. Goldberg was a Research Scientist at New York
University's Media Research Laboratory, where, along with
Professor Ken Perlin, he developed the Improv Animation
System, a tool for creating lifelike interactive animated
actors for special effects, animated films and interactive
games and applications. He has presented the animation system
in many published papers and performed demonstrations at
numerous conferences and symposia, including ACM SIGGRAPH
(94-99), Hypertext 96, Lifelike Computer Characters (94-96)
and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence's
Symposium on Interactive Story Systems.

His work at NYU has been described in numerous magazines,
newspapers and television programs and has been featured in
a number of books including "Digital Illusions" edited by
Clark Dodsworth for Addison-Wesley, "The Interactive Book"
by Celia Pearce for Macmillan Technical Publishing, "Hamlet
on the Holodeck" by Janet Murray for The Free Press and the
new edition of "The Animation Book" by Kit Laybourne for
Three Rivers Press, a division of Crown Publishing. 

Prior to his work at NYU, Mr. Goldberg spent several years
as an Illustrator, an Off-Broadway theatrical lighting and
set designer and a multimedia installation and performance
artist during which time he studied painting at the Art
Students League in New York and L'Ecole Albert Defois in France.

Before beginning his professional career, Mr. Goldberg studied
Film and Television Production at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts
during which time he also worked for Edwin Schlossberg Inc.
assisting in the development and testing of large-scale
multi-user interactive games and applications.

Mr. Goldberg is a member of the American Association for
Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the International Game Developers
Association (IGDA) and the Association for Computing Machinery's
Special Interest Groups in Graphics and Artificial Intelligence
(ACM SIGGRAPH and SIGART). He is on the AI Standards Committee of
the IGDA as part of the Working Group on Finite State Machines,
and is a member of the editorial board for ACM Computers in
Entertainment.