Sara de Freitas is Director of Research at the Serious Games Institute at the University of Coventry where she leads an applied research team working closely with industry. Appointed Professor of Virtual Environments, she holds a visiting senior research fellowship at the London Knowledge Lab, London, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Voted the Most Influential Woman in Technology 2009 and 2010 by US Fast Company, Sara chairs the IEEE Serious Games and Virtual Worlds conferences (VS-Games. Her current lines of research are examining multimodal interfaces, experience design and perceptual modelling in games and virtual worlds towards developing the next generation of intelligent tutoring environments. She is the Scientific Coordinator for the GaLA Network of Excellence in Serious Games funded under FP7.
Michela Ott is a senior researcher at the Institute for Educational Technology within the Italian National Research Council (ITD-CNR). She has participated in, led and coordinated many national and international research projects in the field of Educational Technology. She is a member of the editorial board of important journals and is the author of more than 100 scientific publications published in national and international journals, books and conference proceedings. She is the author of several educational software packages and has contributed to the design and implementation of hypermedia systems. She leads national research projects dealing with the use of digital Mind Games to support and enhance students reasoning skills. She is involved in both STELLAR (Sustaining Technology Enhanced Learning at a LARge scale- www.stellarnet.eu) and GaLA (Game and Learning Alliance-www. galanoe.EU) Networks of Excellence: the former focuses on Technology Enhanced Learning and the second on Serious Games.
Maria Popescu is associate Professor at the Carol I National Defence University, in Bucharest, Romania. She has been working closely with the ADL Department within the Carol I NDU and participated in many research projects and initiatives on e-learning and technology-enhanced education. Her research focuses on educational software tools, Open Educational Resources use and policy, online education, e-pedagogy and eLearning, instructional design , towards a wider implementation of all these within the educational system at large. At present she is involved with the GaLA European Network (Game and Learning Alliance) as task leader in Serious Games metrics and taxonomy.
Ioana Andrea Stanescu is a senior researcher at Advanced Distributed Learning Romania. Her research focuses on knowledge management; e-learning & m-learning; Game-Based Learning; collaborative technology; and Human Computer Interaction. She has been involved in the development and management of R&D projects that support knowledge acquisition, interoperability and reuse, and that target the improvement of the learning milieu through systems integration and intelligent solutions. The results of her research have been published in international conference proceedings and scientific journals and have been integrated in educational products. Currently, she is active in the European Game and Learning Alliance (GaLA) Network of Excellence.
