Program and Play - Roberto Dillon

Roberto Dillon was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1973.

In 1981 he had his first encounter with a home computer, a Texas Instrument 99/4A, and in 1983 he received a Commodore 64 that hooked him into technology and computer science ever since.

Roberto holds a Master and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Genoa (both his thesis focused on computational models for analyzing emotions in music playing with applications to interactive media) and worked as Programmer / Analyst in his hometown before moving to Stockholm, Sweden, as a Guest Researcher at the department of Speech, Music and Hearing within the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH).

In 2005 he moved to Singapore as a Research Fellow at gameLAB in Nanyang Technological University for designing and developing innovative and educational computer games, with a special focus on artificial intelligence and interactive audio techniques. His main project over there was the ‘Virtual Orchestra’, an original game/simulation for introducing children to music which was featured internationally on newspapers and magazines such as ‘The Straits Times’ (Singapore), ‘The Taipei Times’ (Taiwan), MUSO (UK) and ‘USA Today’ where it was presented as the ‘guitar hero for the symphony crowd’.

In 2007 he moved to the School of Interactive and Digital Media at Nanyang Polytechnic, still in Singapore , where he was module leader for courses like "Audio Creation" (i.e. acoustics and sound design for games), "Production and Project Management" and "Digital Entertainment and Society", while tutoring other modules like "Artificial Intelligence for Games" and C++ programming. Besides teaching activities, he successfully proposed and designed a new idea for an "active" music gaming experience, M-EDGE, where games have to be played by means of expressing emotions through music. This ambitious project aimed at mixing together cognitive science, music and physical computing into a gaming scenario and got full support from the National Research Foundation of Singapore, which funded it with about US$1m.

Currently Roberto is an Assistant Professor at the Singapore Campus of the DigiPen Institute of Technology and can be reached via email at roberto {at} ProgramAndPlay {dot} com

If interested, a full resume in pdf format, containing also a list of publications and game projects, is available here.

Roberto's Ph.D. thesis "On the recognition of expressive intentions in music playing: a computational approach with experiments and applications" in pdf format is downloadable here


The Straits Times (21 Feb 2006) Singapore	USA Today (31 Oct 2006) USA	MUSO (May/June 2006) UK

The Straits Times (4 Jan 2008) The Games Machine (Nov 2009, in Italian)