DAVID JOYNER is executive director of Online Education and OMSCS in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. His research focuses on online education and learning at scale, especially as they intersect with for-credit offerings at the graduate and undergraduate levels. He emphasizes designing learning experiences that leverage online learning opportunities to compensate for the loss of synchronous collocated class time. This includes leveraging artificial intelligence for student support and assignment evaluation, facilitating student communities in large online classes, and investigating strategies for maintainable and interactive presentation of online instructional material. As part of his work, Joyner teaches online versions of CS6460: Educational Technology, CS6750: Human-Computer Interaction, CS7637: Knowledge-Based AI, and CS1301: Introduction to Computing. He is vice-chair of the Steering Committee for the ACM Learning @ Scale conference and the general chair for the 2019 and 2020 conferences.
Joyner has received several awards for his work in teaching online, including the 2019 USG Regents’ Teaching Excellence Award for Online Teaching, 2018 Georgia Tech Center for Teaching & Learning Curriculum Innovation Award, and the 2016 Georgia Tech College of Computing Lockheed Excellence in Teaching Award.
Maui-raised sansei IDA YOSHINAGA is a non-traditional scholar of film, television, and media studies working at the intersection of genre theory, creative writing pedagogy, cultural studies, and cinematic production studies. A hybrid scholar-practitioner of the speculative/fantastic arts, she specializes in cultural screen stories, including community-engaged movies and network/cable/streaming shows, with a focus on story development, cross-cultural adaptation, and the politics of cinematic pre-production as well as critical reception, as these processes apply to the scripted (fictional) screenplay form. Her work can be found in the collection of thinkpieces on science-fiction/fantasy (SFF) studies in the new millennium, Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction (MIT Press 2022), which she co-edited with Sean Guynes and Gerry Canavan; The Routledge Companion to Gender and Science Fiction (2022), where she put together an introductory roundtable of feminist, queer, and trans SFF fiction authors from diverse backgrounds; The Routledge Companion to Media and Fairytale Cultures (2018) in which she applied the concept of transmedia/storyworlds to fairytale narratives; and journals such as Narrative Culture, Marvels & Tales, Science Fiction Studies, The New Ray Bradbury Review, The Journal of the Sussex Center for Folklore, and Science Fiction Film and Television, the last for which she is one of a team of three main editors.
LISA YASZEK is Regents’ Professor of Science Fiction Studies at Georgia Tech, where she explores science fiction as a global language crossing centuries, continents, and cultures. Her books include Galactic Suburbia: Recovering Women’s Science Fiction (2008); Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (2016); and The Future is Female! Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women series (2018-present).
Yaszek’s ideas about science fiction as a window to cultural history have been featured in venues including The Washington Post, Food and Wine Magazine, and USA Today, and she has been an expert commentator for CBS Sunday Morning, BBC4, Turner Classic Movies, and the AMC miniseries James Cameron’s Story of Science Fiction. A past president of the Science Fiction Research Association, Yaszek currently serves as a juror for the Eugie Foster and Philip K. Dick Speculative Fiction Awards.
MARK LEIBERT has operated at the intersection of art and technology for two decades. He is an artist, academic, and industry professional. His research and teaching interests include painting, color theory, visual culture, web and graphic design, UX, and artist materials. His portraits result from a poetic engagement with algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Leibert’s design and digital experience includes projects with the High Museum of Art, The Papers of George Washington, the Carter Center, the Task Force for Global Health, and many others. He is the principal and creative director of Kaikoo Media and works actively in the web and graphic design industry, focusing mainly on projects with non-profit organizations. His artwork, which includes painting, photography, and digital installations, is in private and corporate collections, including the High Museum of Art, Capital One, and Ritz Carlton, among others. He co-founded Day and Night Projects, an Atlanta artist-run gallery, and Sander Hudson Gallery represents his work. He has taught at James Madison University, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, SCAD, Georgia State University, and Georgia Tech.
