Author

Alan B. Craig, PhD, has been with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) for over 25 years. Additionally, he is the Associate Director for Human–Computer Interaction at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS). He is also the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science liaison for the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE).

Dr. Craig is no stranger to writing. He has also written Understanding Virtual Reality by William R. Sherman and Alan B. Craig and Developing Virtual Reality Applications by Alan B. Craig, William R. Sherman, and Jeffrey D. Will, all for Morgan Kaufmann Publishing. Additionally, he has written numerous book chapters, journal articles, and popular articles. He speaks nationally and internationally on a variety of topics to audiences ranging from academia to government to industry.

Over the course of his career, he has been involved both in the study of, and development of, many technologies and concepts, including virtual real- ity, augmented reality, scientific visualization, high-performance computing, collaborative systems, data mining, and web systems. He has received three U.S. patents for his innovations. In addition to his work in the visual repre- sentation of information, Dr. Craig has been deeply involved in the use of sound to represent data, as well as multimodal systems. His work has ranged over the entire reality continuum from the real, to the digital, and back to the real via personal fabrication, as well as at the edges between worlds. In all his endeavors he has focused primarily on applications related to education.

Outside of his professional life, Dr. Craig is involved in numerous other crea- tive endeavors, focusing primarily on the writing, recording, and performance of music.