I am working with some of the brightest folks here at Intel, our subject matter experts and architects, such as Clay Breshears, Michael Wrinn, Bob Chesebrough and Tim Mattson (amongst others).  I will also be working closely with the indomitable Wolfgang Rosenberg, manager of the Intel Academic Community. 

My job is to reach out to educators and researchers around the world, to connect them with Intel experts and to help foster development of a curriculum to educate the next generation of programmers and engineers on the newest compute platforms.

Hopefully, this blog will go a long way to opening up channels of communication 

We have a number of events and initiatives planned for this year. 

We have already started our monthly Academic Community Curriculum Webinar Series.  During these webinars, we discuss the newest curriculum topics.  It is a great way to speak directly with our course architects.  I moderate the series and I very much look forward to speaking with you there soon.

The next in the series is on May 15 on multi-core design patterns.  Please Register below.

 Register or view past event here.

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We are creating quite a few short videos supporting our academic efforts.

 I'm in the process now of filming a series on threading topics with an emphasis on game development and visual computing.  So far only the first title on Optimizing for DirectX is posted, but the rest will be available soon.

Is this type of content useful?  Are there better ways to scale out our knowledge and build conversation?  I'd like to hear that from you.

 I've asked around internally as to how folks like to consume information.  As you might imagine, there were a wide-range of responses.  Tim Mattson just rolled his eyes when I started to talk about videos and webinars.  While he is a great presenter, his own preference is to just download the PowerPoint or code and have done with it.

Others, myself included, prefer a richer content set.  For me, nothing beats the immediacy of a live event.  That is one reason we have our monthly webinars.  I am also quite interested in convening smaller conversations, perhaps using something like Communicator or Live Meeting, to discuss specific topics or curriculum ideas.  Let me know by responding to this blog.

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Finally, I've become very interested in different forms of new media.  I'm often available on Twitter -find me as @psteinb.

I am the owner of the Intel Software Second Life Island. 

IM me on Second Life as Peretz Stine.

Check out our launch video.

Over the last year, we ran an event series on our Second Life island dedicated to engaging engineers and professionals around the world in conversation on this unique environment.  That program, sadly, is ended, but you can still view much of it here:

Are you interested in meeting on Second Life or other virtual worlds?  It can be arranged.

 Well that's enough for now -you have you orders -tell me how best to foster dialogue.  I'll be working as hard as I can, but you are the whole point.  Let's start the conversation.

Now I think PowerPoint is a fine tool, we just use and abuse it beyond its intended function. For example, sometimes a discussion is just better served with visual cues, whether charts, pictures, or even (I suppose) those stick figure clip-art people. Likewise a discussion sometimes needs to have a constrained, focused agenda, which is what I get with a series of PPT slides. PowerPoint definitely has some valuable uses.

In our case, we wanted an interactive discussion. The scenario was a presentation on the status of the mobile developer community on ISN to people two levels up the food chain. The recipients were my manager, his peers, and his boss. The outcome we wanted was to level set on the status of our community, get input into our strategy and plans, and actively discuss some of the challenges we're facing. Interactive discussion = Good. Silence while everyone does email = Bad.

Our preparation was to put all of the background material and presentation content on a page into an outline in our internal wiki. The wiki allowed for collaborative editing, and brought a lot of transparency to the discussion. We didn't want to surprise the viewers with the no-PowerPoint approach, so we sent out the wiki address two days in advance with an invitation for comments. We cautioned them that the content wasn't finalized, but welcomed input on the planned topics and outline. We incorporated several comments into the final presentation, so it worked well.

During the presentation itself, I held the page open for editing while others viewed it either projected in a conference room or on their own laptops. We explained the agenda of the presentation (Current Status, Future Plans, then Roadblocks & Challenges) and encouraged people to ask questions about anything they read - not just what I was talking about. We knew we couldn't cover every point in the wiki, but by letting people read on their own we could jump to the hottest areas of discussion for more detail.

Keeping the wiki open for editing allowed me to make changes as we talked. At one point I was able to update some metrics that were IM'd to me by someone else on the call. We added some of the follow up tasks and questions as we went, then fleshed it out in more detail afterwards. The wiki page is now the full agenda, content, notes, and meeting minutes for the entire presentation.

Specific thoughts on using a wiki for presentations:

• More interactive discussion - People were not bounded by the topic of the current PPT slide, so we got exactly the sort of engaged debate we were after.
• Trickier to guide the flow - The flip side of the above point is that without a slide declaring "This the current topic", things jumped around. We had to be willing quick on our feet.
• Have to know the material - I do not recommend the wiki approach if you don't know your topic very well. Again, this is interactive so there isn't any room to hide if people start firing hardball questions.
• Easier collaboration - Ability to create the content for the presentation in a centralized area rather than passing around files saved tons of time (and had revision tracking for a bonus).
• Standard format - Everyone didn't have to have a Windows machine to follow along. Also easier to print for later reference, or to grab sections out to drop into other presentations or collateral.
• Greater detail - Only so much detail can go onto a PPT slide before it becomes an eye chart. In the wiki, people could read in greater depth, read it quickly, then ask questions.
• Not as visual - If we had a more visual oriented presentation rather than discussion based, this may not have worked as well. To me, one of PowerPoint's strengths.
• Harder to time the discussion - We use a "10 minutes per slide" rule of thumb when presenting PPT, but I had no idea what that translated to for a wiki. We included more material than we could cover, which we need to watch closely. It's not entirely bad because people were still able to read it and get the info even if it wasn't discussed.

Overall, it was a definite success and we'll be trying it again in more meetings. It helps that our team is willing to try odd things in the name of both Social Media Experimentation and Saving The World From PowerPoint Poisoning, but I can't imagine others won't be willing to give it a shot.

I hope this was of interest, and I'd love to hear any thoughts on how to improve this technique for the next time around!

COLLADA, Tools and Intel Graphics:
Luxology MODO 302, Softimage XSI, or see http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/videos/home.aspx

Someone needs to do something similar for virtual worlds applications (as they emerge).

As you probably know, Marcus and I are deeply involved in the COLLADA project. We started it at SCE and, thanks to SCE's genuine desire to help the game developer community, contributed it as an open standard to The Khronos Group. The community of users and developers taking advantage of this technology has grown steadily, and many companies in and out of the video game industry are now relying on the existance of this technology for their businesses..

And the good news is that COLLADA has a big role to in our new project! And Intel has therefore became an active contributor, adding to the ever growing number of companies supporting this effort. And more concretely please allow me to proudly announce Intel's COLLADA involvement at GDC 2008.

There will be a COLLADA demo station on the Intel booth (#5917). This is a generous investment that Intel is providing and we have invited many ISV to demonstrate the power of their COLLADA tools, running on Intel hardware of course.

The schedule shows that 6 companies (Luxology, Softimage, Adobe, Feeling Software, Geomerics, Gamr7) each have half a day to demonstrate new products and describe how COLLADA has helped them and their customers.

Some of those companies are well known already within the user community and they will be showing new ways of taking advantage of COLLADA, such as a web-browser embedded COLLADA viewer from Feeling Software, or the new nested reference model / delta nodes in XSI 6.5 from Softimage as described in this month's issue of Game Developer Magazine, or the COLLADA importer into Photoshop from Adobe that enables artists to visualize and edit textures on 3D models without wasting time exporting/importing into another 3D package.

Thanks to the flexibility of COLLADA and the computational power that Intel CPUs are providing to multi-threaded applications, I invite you to visit the intel booth according to the schedule to witness Geomerics' real-time global illumincation technology, Gamr7's procedural city generator, and Luxology's modeling and rendering solution that can all be easily integrated in a game content pipeline thanks to COLLADA.

In addition to contributing space on the booth, Intel is also sponsoring a "COLLADA in the Game" panel, Wednesday at noon. I invite you to come with many questions for our panelists from Adobe, Crytek, Luxology, Midway, and Softimage. This will make my life easier since as the panel moderator I will just have to let you do all the work!

There should me many more references to COLLADA at GDC, such as NVIDIA's FX Composer 2 presentation.

Looking forward to GDC.

   Hey everyone!

All next week you'll score big by signing up for this year's Intel Game Demo Contest, where your idea for a game will net you a bonus thank you gift, courtesy of Intel Software Network! This promotion is only good until 5PM PST on Friday, February 22, 2008 -- so put your thinking caps on and get your entry in. Turn your game idea into an actual working game demo and later this year you will be eligible for cash and tons of other prizes!

I'm so excited to see this year's entries & ideas since we had such great ones last year.  Hope to see you soon in San Francisco!

Well, first of all, I understand the frustrations. As consumers we hope that our new systems will run our favorite software. But are comments to blogs the right place to go for help (ok - I am guilty of this as well)? Well, I suppose so if the problem is a simple configuration issue and there aren't actual bugs or defects in the components (ie, the chipset, the drivers, the OS, the application itself which in this case would be Second Life.) While I try to provide valuable information in my blogs, I have no influence over what happens with SL software and Intel graphics cards.

For issues involving the Second Life software, I'll bet that the Second Life Support Center would be a good place to go. From the Support Center link, they seem to have a Knowledge Base, a link to Submit a Ticket, a Solution Finder Link and a Downloads link.

If the problem is in the chipset/graphics drivers, folks can go to the following link: Email Intel Support for chipsets

There is also an Intel and Second Life Forum where folks can ask questions and maybe even find answers - I would probably try this avenue first (the folks moderating this forum are working closely with the Graphics/chipset people.)

Since it might be difficult to pinpoint where the problem is, it might not be a bad idea to just submit the question at both the SL support site and the Intel sites (IF your computer has an Intel Chipset!!) I'd like to think that if all the folks who are having issues submit them to these support sites, we are far more likely to get them resolved.

By Mal Burns:

The hack worked fine for a while but the problem now seems to be the new "Windlight" SL client which will not allow occlusion o be set to false. It seems to simply generate a new settings.xml file and then runs as a new install.

I checked this blog last night and now it appears they know it is a problem in Open_GL and there is a setting you can add to your "settings.xml" file that seems to work (I just tried it and I'm "in World" now.) There is also a Second life Forum Thread pertaining to this fix too - click HERE to read through it.

Here is the "hack":

Find the "user_settings" folder under your Second Life folder that is under AppData or Applications Data. (It may be different whether you have XP or Vista. Also on one of my systems this file is under .../Roaming/Second Life/user_settings/ ) Note also you will have a folder with your Avatar's name. Don't change the settings.xml file in that folder - change the one in the user_settings folder.

• Find this folder on your system: \Users\myname\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\user_settings\settings.xml. You will have to manually add the command to disable Object Occlusion to this file. The lines to add are:
  • <!--Enable object culling based on occlusion (coverage) by other objects-->
  • <UseOcclusion value="FALSE"/>
• Save the setting.xml file and then try to connect to Second Life.

If you can't find this file, it may be hidden so go into your Folder Options and "Show hidden files."

Here are some other useful links as well: Second Life Wiki and Reducing Lag with Client Settings.

For more information on this hack - see the forum posting and blog that are included in this posting.

-- Atalanta Intel (in World)