Program and Play

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 introduced as the ‘guitar hero for the symphony crowd’. 

Since 2007 he moved to the School of Interactive and Digital Media at Nanyang Polytechnic, still in Singapore, where he is lecturing "Audio Creation" (i.e. sound design and programming for games) while tutoring other modules like "Artificial Intelligence for Games". Besides teaching activities, he successfully proposed and designed a new idea for an "active" music gaming experience, M-EDGE, where games are going to be played by means of expressing emotions through music. This is an ambitious project that aims at mixing together cognitive science, music and physical computing into a gaming scenario. The project is currently under development and is fully funded by the National Research Foundation of Singapore.  

Roberto is an IGDA (International Game Developers Association) member and can be reached via email at roberto.dillon {at} member.igda.org 

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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

A selection of articles from newspapers and magazines describing Roberto's serious game the Virtual Orchestra (copyright 2006 by Nanyang Technological University, all rights reserved) follows:

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

Other articles where I was featured/interviewed:

An article published on "Il Sole 24 Ore", the most important Italian financial newspaper, by Gianluca Masina. It is dedicated to young Italian professionals who are teaching game design and development topics abroad.  I am interviewed together with  Dr. Stefano Gualeni and Dr. Fabio Zambetta

Il Sole24Ore (26 Apr 2007) Italy