Kenneth S. Williams
Executive Director & CEO

Ken is a longtime entertainment and media professional including an almost 20-year career at Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures, where he founded the Digital Studios Division and co-founded Sony Pictures Imageworks, the Academy Award winning visual effects, animation and multimedia company. For the past two years, he has been a private investor and consultant in the entertainment and media space. Previously, Ken held C-level positions with Captive Media LLP, Ascent Media Group, and Technicolor Digital Cinema, LLC.

Edie Meadows
Chief Administrative Officer

Edie has been a part of the Entertainment Technology Center since 1994 where she oversees the center’s day-to-day operations, including sponsor memberships, events, budget, contracts, program management and staff/student supervision for ETC projects and initiatives. Before moving to California, Edie worked at the State University of New York, Buffalo State’s Center for Development of Human Services as an evaluation specialist and, among other accomplishments, helped to implement an application for the NY State medical assistance program.

Yves Bergquist
Director, AI in Media

Yves is an AI researcher and the director of the “AI in Media” Project at ETC. At the Center, Yves and his team use frontier AI methods to help media companies develop deep insights into their content, their audiences, and the cognitive relationship between the two. For the past 3 years, he has been working, often in collaboration with SMPTE, on developing an industry-wide view of ethical standards for the media industry, and has led industry-funded research into moral bounding of conversational agents. Yves is also the co-founder and CEO of Corto, an AI startup developing AI tools to make stories and audiences computable through the DNA analysis of narratives. Corto is in Private Beta with a dozen studios, advertising agencies, and global consumer brands, and is already used to develop film, TV, and branded content. In addition, he is a member of the Digital Storytelling Lab at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where he participates in the lab’s work on emerging storytelling platforms and methods.

Philip Lelyveld
Director, Immersive Media Initiative

Philip Lelyveld runs the Immersive Media Initiative that studies and works to influence the creative, technical, social, and business issues that will shape this new, emerging art form. Phil is currently working on the rapidly evolving ecosystem that includes immersive media, IoT, AI, and blockchain. He is producing a series of Immersive Media Challenges; asking current students and recent grads to come up with ideas for experiences that are not possible today but could be in 3-5 years, and to describe what it will take to get ‘from here to there.’

Prior to the Immersive Media Initiative, Phil oversaw the Next Generation Display (‘UHD TV Plus’) Project and managed the Consumer 3D Experience Lab at the Entertainment Technology Center at USC.  The Consumer 3D Experience Lab researched stereoscopic 3D in the home, on personal devices, in public spaces, in advertising, and in theaters.

Phil joined the ETC@USC after 10 years VP of Digital Industry Relations within Disney’s corporate New Technology and New Media group.  He led major entertainment technology initiatives across multiple Disney business units, and represented Disney at multi-studio and multi-industry meetings.

Erik Weaver
Director, Adaptive Production

Erik Weaver, a specialist focused on the intersection of cloud and the media and entertainment industry, is currently director of ETC’s Adaptive Production project and special projects. Prior work at ETC includes “Production in the Cloud” that encompassed many aspects of the cloud, including transport, security, metadata, long-term storage, and the formation of an agnostic framework that unites key vendors and studios. Erik was also global M&E strategist for Western Digital.  Weaver has fostered and achieved many accomplishments in the M&E market including executive producer of “The Suitcase,” (CAA’s People’s Choice award, 2017 Tribeca Film Festival), a project focused on HDR, cloud-based workflows and Live 360; executive producer of “Wonder Buffalo” (2017 SXSW Interactivity competition) that focused on an HRD first, Cloud, & Volumetric capture. The project brought together by Volumetric capture, Photogrammetry, Ambonisic(?) sound, and interactivity. He chaired/programmed NAB’s “Next Generation Media Technologies” Conference 2014-2017, as well as vNAB/vETC 2015-2019.  Erik also led the SMPTE C4 MR30 Standards group, which oversaw and helped educate the M&E industry on using C4, Semantics, and NoSQL for Managing Motion Picture Data.  He has spoken at dozens of M&E conferences and tradeshows.

George Gerba
Consultant

Following his experience as a technical director in dance and repertory theater, George moved to Los Angeles for LAOOC’s Olympics Arts Festival. In 1987 he joined Walt Disney Pictures where he managed the legendary Ink and Paint department at Feature Animation at the beginning of their transition into the electronic world. At Walt Disney Imagineering he was the first general manager of the Architecture & Facility Engineering group. He graduated to Creative Development at Imagineering as a senior concept designer where he was pivotal in the concept development of Disney-MGM Studios Europe, Tokyo Disney Seas, and many other break-through projects. He moved to Disney Televentures and worked on navigational concept development for a Disney video partnership with various telephone companies. George was part of the exciting growth moment in mobile at the Walt Disney Internet Group and eventually moved to corporate Disney to evangelize a broad view of intertwined entertainment and technical issues. He has always focused on understanding and communicating by visionary example, the entertainment value of technology change.

Robert Scott
Editor ETCentric

Rob is a media consultant, freelance writer, and communication professor currently based on the east coast. He joined the ETC in 2008 for our live reporting from the Consumer Electronics Show and has since been involved with a number of ETC initiatives including our ETCentric publication, annual CES coverage, and the cross-industry Interoperable Master Format technical specification. As a consultant, Rob has worked with an array of industry innovators in digital cinema, media asset management, content distribution, and various business and creative strategies involving digital technologies. Rob was formerly with the New Technology & New Media department at The Walt Disney Company where he managed online and video communication initiatives. He earned his MFA in Film Studies & Screenwriting from the University of Miami and studied multimedia at the American Film Institute. His professional background includes corporate communication, entertainment media technologies, film & video production, and saltwater big game fishing.

Dennis Kuba
Consultant

As VP Advanced Technology at The Walt Disney Company, Dennis was responsible for building an enterprise technology culture and social network by bringing Disney’s innovators together to facilitate shared learning experiences, enable new business opportunities, and build a digital media infrastructure. At Disney Imagineering, he co-authored the original Disney Channel Business Plan, which created Disney’s first cable television network. He analyzed the European consumer market to provide guidance on theme park design for the Euro Disneyland project and led Imagineering’s introduction to computer graphics technologies, which transitioned the creative process from analog to digital. Most recently, he directed a multi-company project team to report on consumer electronics trends for the ETC. He served as account director for the Taproot Foundation where he led a website development team for the Asian Pacific Health Care Venture. Dennis is also an avid photographer, and was awarded Grand Prize in Scouting Magazine’s annual photography contest.