Imec closed out 2025 with significant announcements that underscore its growing influence in semiconductor R&D and AI systems design. Between a high-profile debut at Super Computing 2025 and a strong showing at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), the Belgium-based research center marked the end of the year with momentum across multiple technology fronts.
In November at Super Computing 2025, one of the world’s largest gatherings for high-performance computing, imec unveiled imec.kelis, an analytical performance modeling tool aimed at reshaping how AI datacenters are planned and optimized.
Imec positioned the platform as a response to pressures facing datacenter designers, as AI workloads expand into the trillions of parameters and energy demands climb. According to the organization, imec.kelis offers a faster and more transparent alternative to conventional simulation tools, which are often slow or limited in scope.
Early adopters have already begun exploring the platform, an early sign of commercial interest.
“Imec.kelis is more than a simulator—it’s a strategic enabler for the next generation of AI infrastructure,” said Axel Nackaerts, system scaling lead.
Imec.kelis provides an end-to-end analytical framework that evaluates performance across compute, communication, and memory subsystems. The tool is optimized for large languagemodel (LLM) training and inference, offering predictions validated on widely used systems such as Nvidia’s A100 and H100 GPUs.
The platform draws heavily on imec’s longstanding expertise in hardware-software co-design, system-level modeling, and semiconductor technology road mapping. Imec said the goal is to give system architects the ability to make better-informed decisions at datacenter scale, where design choices directly impact cost, efficiency, and sustainability.
At the beginning of December 2025, imec continued to demonstrate research leadership at the 71st International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), presenting 21 papers spanning advanced logic, memory, quantum computing, imaging, and bioelectronics.
With a high-visibility launch in HPC computing and a deep bench of contributions at IEDM, imec concludes 2025 with strengthened leadership in both advanced semiconductor research and the rapidly expanding AI datacenter ecosystem. The organization is positioning itself as a critical contributor to the technologies that will define next-generation computing infrastructure.
Guillaume de Fondaumiere is the Co-CEO of the Quantic Dream Studio based in France, which developed games such as, “Fahrenheit” (2005), “Heavy Rain” (2010), and in collaboration with Sony Computer Entertainment, the PS3 exclusive title, “Beyond: Two Souls”, starring actors Ellen Page and Willem Dafoe (2013).
Today, on the 15th anniversary of “Heavy Rain,” he finds himself reminiscing: “In the mid-2000s when we started production on “Heavy Rain” I was executive producer on the project. I was also responsible for managing relationships with actors, composers, etc. In the weeks leading up to the launch, we decided with Sony, to send the game to several editorial teams. I remember very clearly sending out those codes, one after another. And a few weeks later we started receiving the first reviews. It was a huge relief to realize that the reviewers had understood what we are trying to do. When we hit after six weeks, one million copies I couldn’t help but shed a tear, telling myself “Phew!”. What I’d tell to myself fifteen years ago in the tough moments, because there are always some during a game’s development, is this: “Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay.”
Guillaume de Fondaumiere was also appointed the Chairman of the European Games Developer Federation. During his position, the French government and the European Union agreed to introduce a 20% tax credit for video games studios. He not only fought for many years to support the gaming industry, but had also lobbied for the games industry to be recognized as an art form.
“To me, all games are a form of cultural expression”, he says. “I see no reason why games should be treated differently than any type of literature or any type of movie. I think that more and more video games are becoming artful, and are becoming a form of art that should be recognized next to the others.” In his opinion, games should be placed among institutional forms of art such as, architecture, sculpture, visual arts, music, literature, theater, cinema art and media arts (television, radio and photography).
Media and internet often sell the information; games trigger the violence, players get addicted to them, and at the end, they are merely entertainment for young and immature minds. The stereotype of thinking associate games with either the shooting or the lighthearted entertainment for children. The reasons for such thinking originate from the early years of the gaming industry, which was actually targeted the children. The first games were very simple, they had boosted the simplest instinctive behavior and the release of adrenaline, which is also referred to as hormone 3F – fear, fight, flight.
But since that time has changed almost everything: games, hardware and the players themselves. Today, the old game enthusiasts had grown up and they still want to play games but they expect deeper, artistic and intellectual entertainment. Under such demanding clients there was a dynamic and multidirectional development of games, and palette of emotions has greatly increased. Today, players can incarnate in any characters, make their own choices, stand for duels with hundreds of players from all over the world. Production studios strive for authenticity and put meticulous attention to details.
Every little part is important, and approaching players to reality. There is also a 3D technology that changed the flat images into three-dimensional images. Today’s game has a story, uses the visual graphics and new, advanced forms of interaction with the player. In addition, there is also increased proliferation of the authors in the games industry, artists express themselves creatively and individually. The impact of games on mass culture is unquestionable and its value is growing at a dynamic pace.
So, is art or not?
A precise, unambiguous, and commonly held definition of art does not exist. However, it is known that art acts through aesthetic, ethical or cultural functions. It affects its audience through watching, listening, creating and reflecting. Without a doubt, the video game industry, which is the fastest growing sector of the modern entertainment industry, is a part of modern culture.
P.S. Roger Ebert, the legendary (Pulitzer Prize) film critic, who for 46 years shaped the tastes of American film audiences, remarked, “as long as there is a great movie unseen or a great book unread, I will continue to be unable to find the time to play video games”. He repeated this statement for eight years and once he hit harder “video games can never be art.”. He died in 2013, with no chance for revision of his assessment.
Medicine—once reactive, treating disease only after symptoms appear—is rapidly evolving into something new. In 2014 American biologist and biotech pioneer Dr. Leroy Hood has offered the clearest vision of tomorrow’s healthcare. He describes the future as 4P Medicine: Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, Participatory. This vision is no longer on the horizon—it has arrived.
This shift, driven by biotechnology and digital innovation, marks one of the greatest transformations in the history of healthcare.
For generations, people have relied on forecasts to guide their daily decisions. When we want to know what the weather will be tomorrow, we open an app on our phone, turn on the radio, or watch the evening news. These predictions help us choose the right clothing, plan a trip, or prepare for a storm. Though convenient, these forecasts are not essential to survival. If we don’t know the weather, life goes on.
But the question “What will my health be like tomorrow?” is very different. Unlike the weather, the answer can determine the course of our life. Will we wake up feeling strong and healthy? Will cold symptoms appear overnight? Or will tomorrow bring a diagnosis that changes everything—a chronic condition, a genetic disorder, or a life-threatening illness? Knowing the future of our health is profoundly important, yet for most of human history, this knowledge has been out of reach.
Traditional medicine waits. It waits for pain, for symptoms, for problems that must be solved after they occur. For centuries this was the only option, because doctors lacked tools to understand what was happening inside the human body before illness appeared.
But advances in biotechnology, genetics, and data analytics are rewriting the rules. Modern medicine is beginning to resemble weather forecasting: predictive models built from enormous streams of data can now indicate our health risks long before we feel anything.
The science behind this new capability builds on several breakthroughs:
Genomics, which maps our genetic predispositions
Wearable sensors, which collect real-time data about physiology
Artificial intelligence, which identifies patterns invisible to humans
Behavioral tracking, which captures environmental and lifestyle influences
Together, these tools allow physicians to anticipate illness rather than simply react to it.
Millions of people now wear devices that continuously track: heart rate, oxygen level, activity and movement, sleep stages, blood pressure, blood glucose levels or stress signals. These sensors turn our bodies into sources of data, providing information that once required clinical visits. When combined, these data streams create a high-resolution portrait of our health.
The smartphone has quietly become the central device in digital medicine. It stores our medical data, tracks behavior, connects to wearable devices, and hosts apps that analyze symptoms, drug interactions, and lifestyle patterns. For the first time in history, billions of people carry clinical-quality sensors in their pockets.
The human body produces enormous amounts of information each second. Until recently, we lacked the tools to interpret it. AI changes everything. Machine learning models can detect: early sign of heart disease before symptoms occur, cancer signatures in bloodwork, anomalies in breathing and sleeping. AI operates like a constant medical companion, analyzing data streams and alerting us to risks long before a crisis emerges.
The discovery of DNA’s structure in the 1950s was one of the most significant moments in science. But only today—thanks to advances in sequencing—are we fully unlocking its potential. This revolution means individuals can now: understand their genetic predisposition to hundreds of conditions, tailor diet, exercise, and lifestyle to their genetic profile, detect carriers of hereditary diseases within families. Genomics is no longer a laboratory dream—it is becoming part of everyday healthcare.
Artificial intelligence is impacting the music industry at a rapid pace, offering tools for impromptu creation, production, and even performance. Along with text, images, and videos, generative AI can also produce music, assist with songwriting and production, and even replicate voices in a matter of seconds. Deep learning is based through its training data, which through its underlying patterns and structures is used to produce new data based on the input, which often comes in the form of natural language prompts.
There are numerous websites that use this technique, such as Suni, AIVA, Udio just to name a few, that can generate a complete song with music and lyrics in a certain style, mood, instrumentation, genre, and vocal style with just a brief description and a click of a button. These prompts can be entered directly or created using external tools like ChatGPT, which generates the lyrics.
For example, the user can enter into the Suni song description field “a song in the style of classical music about a ballet dancer struggling to find success in her career”. In just seconds with a click on the “create” button, the user will be able to hear a complete song that sounds like it was written by a semi-professional songwriter, with fairly decent lyrics.
Now, anyone can create music…well at least generate it.
Will the listening music public start listening to music produced entirely by A.I. instead of the real music we know and love?
The answer is many of them already are without really knowing it.
A.I.’s “The Velvet Sundown”
For example, last June, “The Velvet Sundown” (named after “The Velvet Underground”) came out of nowhere and released its first albums on Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify as well as other music streaming services: “Floating on Echoes” on June 5, “Dust and Silence” on June 20, and then another on July 14th called “Paper Sun Rebellion”. At their peak, they had well over 900,000 monthly listeners on the streaming platform with their opening track “Dust on the Wind”, (not to be confused with the iconic Kansas song) played over 2.7 million times.
However, there were soon allegations on the bands social media pages that the band was A.I. generated. There was no evidence that this band ever existed. There were no tours, interviews, group websites or any clues whatsoever online. Even many listeners commented that The Velvet Sundown’s music was “soulless” and was missing the “human element”.
The “band” denied all allegations on its X account, claiming it was “absolutely crazy that so-called ‘journalists’ keep pushing the lazy, baseless theory that the Velvet Sundown is ‘AI-generated’ with zero evidence.… This is not a joke. This is our music, written in long, sweaty nights in a cramped bungalow in California with real instruments, real minds and real soul.”
Just a week later, the apparent hoaxer, using the name Andrew Frelon, admitted that he impersonated the band on X and falsely claimed to be a spokesperson for the band in interactions with the media, including a phone interview with Rolling Stone magazine. Frelon finally admitted that the band was 100% A.I. generated using the Suni platform for all the “band”.
“It’s marketing. It’s trolling. People before, they didn’t care about what we did, and now suddenly, we’re talking to Rolling Stone, so it’s like, ‘Is that wrong?’” Frelon questioned.
As with the Spotify subscriber numbers since the “bands” breaking news, over 500,000 subscribers removed their names from the “bands” playlists, a drop of 55% from its peak, as it continues to drop quickly on a daily basis.
The bands Spotify bio eventually changed their description:
“All characters, stories, music, voices and lyrics are original creations generated with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools employed as creative instruments. Any resemblance to actual places, events or persons – living or deceased – is purely coincidental and unintentional. Not quite human. Not quite machine. The Velvet Sundown lives somewhere in between.”
The real issue is its sudden emergence of its popularity and a growing concern about the future of art, culture and authenticity in the era of advanced generative artificial intelligence. It’s both astounding and appalling that music from A.I. can amass and defraud so many listeners in a relatively short amount of time.
“Personally, I’m interested in art hoaxes,” Frelon continues. “The Leeds 13, a group of art students in the U.K., made, like, fake photos of themselves spending scholarship money at a beach or something like that, and it became a huge scandal. I think that stuff’s really interesting.… We live in a world now where things that are fake have sometimes even more impact than things that are real. And that’s messed up, but that’s the reality that we face now. So it’s like, ‘Should we ignore that reality? Should we ignore these things that kind of exist on a continuum of real versus fake or kind of a blend between the two? Or should we dive into it and just let it be the emerging native language of the internet?’”
In another similar hoax “project” from decades ago, one can’t forget the infamous story of the pop group Milli Vanilli and it’s producer Frank Farian, who may have pulled the biggest hoax in popular music history: selling over 7 million albums and 30 million singles, and winning a Grammy for “Best New Artist” by deceiving the public with a pair of lip-synching performance artists who did not sing one note on their records.
Even with the regret and humiliation that Milli Vanilli producer Frank Farian went through, at least their end product was “real music” that used professional musicians and was produced in a recording studio. That takes real talent.
In a notable moment for the music industry, an A.I.-assisted Beatles song, “Now and Then,” won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance in 2025. It was the first time an AI-assisted song received one.I-assisted song received one.
You can credit director Peter Jackson and his production team who worked on the 2021 “The Beatles – Get Back” documentary. They developed an A.I. tool (MAL) for the film and discovered that they could use it to extract John Lennon’s voice from a demo cassette tape recorded in 1974 that originally had Lennon’s piano and vocal on it. They were able to isolate the tracks mixed into a 2 track master and later combined the original 1995 guitar tracks that George Harrison recorded from their “Now and Then” recording session along with McCartney and Starr, who decided to re-record their tracks in 2023 for a true authentic Beatles recording.
Currently, unless you have access to Peter Jacksons MAL A.I. tool, it appears the only way to tell if the music is A.I. generated is if you have software such as Apple’s Logic Pro track splitter and finding “artifacts” from the inputted music files, as music producer Rick Beato calls it.
Also, the music streaming app Deezer, also uses its own tool to identify AI-generated content and declared that 100% of The Velvet Sundown’s tracks were created using A.I. Deezer labels that content on its site, ensuring that AI-generated music does not appear on its recommended playlists and that royalties are maximized for human artists.
Unlike generative A.I., there is nothing fake with the Fab Four latest song, “Now and Then”… it’s just real music with real musicians with a little help from A.I. and their friends; producers Peter Jackson, Giles Martin and George Martin with all of the original Beatles back together again.
“Imagine” that.
Originally published on https://mlsentertainment.com/2025/08/31/milli-vanilli-or-the-velvet-sundown-discerning-real-music-in-the-a-i-era/
Over the past decade, data centers have served as the digital backbone of modern life—warehouses of servers designed to store information, host applications, and deliver content across the internet. But the rise of large-scale artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed what these facilities need to do. Traditional data centers are evolving into AI factories highly specialized, compute-intensive environments designed to train and run AI models at unprecedented scale. This transformation is reshaping architecture, operations, energy consumption, and economics across the tech ecosystem.
NVIDIA held its main GTC (GPU Technology Conference) in San Jose, California, from March 17-21, 2025, focusing heavily on transforming data centers into AI factories with Blackwell Ultra and Reuben architectures, plus AI-powered robotics. Yes, the data centers are no longer in fashion. The AI factories is the word that is describing the transformation what has been happening in technology world.
GTC 2025 solidified NVIDIA’s vision for an AI-driven future, emphasizing massive AI factories, a reinvented computing stack, and the practical application of AI across all industries – from healthcare, life science to manufacture robotics, autonomous vehicles, computer graphics, even video games. Jensen Huang found himself reminiscing on Video games that started Nvidia company in 1983 running the first application and the journey where Nvidia is now.
Key NVIDIA GTC 2025 Themes & Announcements:
AI Factories & Infrastructure: Shift to full-stack accelerated computing, with Blackwell Ultra boosting reasoning workloads and Reuben architecture offering massive performance gains (900x scale-up flops).
Software & Platforms: Introduction of Nvidia Dynamo, an OS for AI factories, and platforms for connecting millions of GPUs.
Physical AI & Robotics: Reality of AI in robotics, logistics, and manufacturing, with demos of self-driving cars and digital humans.
Industry Focus: Deep dives into healthcare (drug discovery), telecommunications (AI-RAN), and public sector AI.
Geopolitics & Sovereign AI: Initiatives for nations to control their own AI infrastructure.
“It’s becoming a giant industry and it’s crushing it and it’s growing exponentially. After A.I., it’s the fastest growing tech sector…” – Ori Inbar, CEO and Co-Founder of AWE
The Augmented World Expo USA 2024, had its 15th anniversary this month, sharing the latest in AR, XR and spatial computing innovations. It’s the longest running and largest event focused on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (XR) in the world. The annual three day event outgrew the Santa Clara Convention Center where the annual event took place for its first fourteen years, relocating to its new home in Long Beach Convention Center, attracting more than 6,000 attendees, 300 exhibitors and 575 speakers.
CEO and Co-founder, Ori Inbar, for the first time in its AWE opening keynote history, entered through the convention floor onto the stage wearing a XR headset (Vision Pro) headset, showing all types of mixed reality and face filters that was shown from his headset directly onto the screen entertaining his AWE audience.
LEARNING FROM XR’S PAST TO CREATE THE FUTURE
During his keynote, he summarized the state of XR and went through a brief XR history lesson from the beginnings from 1963, with a photo of Hugo Gernsback, the father of science fiction, wearing a type of headworn device that looks like a transister radio with two antennas on it, then five years later, in 1968 with a photo of the first working demo of a head-mounted display created by Ivan Sadland, along with the first keyboard mouse and 2D screen.
Hugo Gernsback, the father of science fiction, wearing a type of headworn device in 1963. Courtesy of AWE.
“If we want spatial computing to one day replace 2D computing we all have to become history buffs”, Inbar stresses to the crowd.
For those who unfamiliar with what “spatial computing” means, Wikipedia defines it as follows:
Spatial computing is any of various human–computer interaction techniques that are perceived by users as taking place in the real world, in and around their natural bodies and physical environments, instead of constrained to and perceptually behind computer screens.
For me the essense of spatial computing is very simple and I quote Ivan (Sadland), “The image of an object changes in the same way the real object changes with similar motions of the head”. Inbar continues, “Head computing imitating real life…that’s a concept I would bet my career on…because humans are biologically spatial and so should computing.”
In conjunction to its annual Auggie Awards, AWE had its inauguration and induction ceremony celebrating the first 101 members of the of the XR Hall of fame—a new platform dedicated to honoring the pioneers whose monumental contributions have shaped and propelled the XR industry forward, including Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR and designer of the Oculus Rift . It also featured an XR museum showcassing over 80 vintage AR and VR devices, including the Gernsback headworn device.
THE FUTURE OF XR INDUSTRY: THE TIME IS NOW
According to ARtillery Intelligence, a research and analyst firm for the business of spatial computing, the XRP market today this year is a $35 billion market. In 2027, it’s expected to double to $70 billion. “It’s becoming a giant industry and it’s crushing it and it’s growing exponentially. After AI, it’s the fastest growing tech sector.” says Inbar.
“Big Tech are all in a tight race to lead the market and it’s rearranging. Each player is retrenching in it to its strengths: software, hardware, operating system, infrastructure…doubling down or opening up and partnering, partnering, partnering. This is good for the market and it’s great for customers.”
According to Inbar, AR penetration has been stagnant around the 30%, but active usage is on the rise and VR adoption is growing where it really matters with the new generation; one in four teenagers are playing in VR.
Almost every single Fortune 1000 company has adopted XR. Enterprise revenue is now over 70% of the XR market. Fortune 1000 companies made its presence at AWE this week. All are participating in AWE’s new enterprise focus program which is ironically called “Focus” with custom export tours, roundtables, networking and really getting business done”, according to Inbar.
“Investments are picking up. Anderson Horwitz, probably the most influential VC in the world is bullish about XR.”, Inbar says. The partner at the firm recently posted this: “We believe AR/VR is among the most underrated markets today”. “Quest has a similar sales trajectory to the iPhone…the time is now” …
“On the Quest store, more than 40 developers have earned over $10 million each”, Inbar continued “amd what’s attractive about XR is that the most popular experiences on the Quest store did it with small teams and no funding.” He cites “Gorilla Tag”, “Penguin Paradise”, and “NoClip” were built with no funding and with one or two people. In addition, games are no longer developed exclusively for XR. Many iOS and Android developers are shifting to spatial with an estimate of over 2 million XR developers in the world.
As an attendee who has been going to the AWE conferences since the very beginnings, never did I have any doubt that VR, AR, MR, XR didn’t have a future. I’m really looking forward to another fifteen years that XR has to offer.
It’s been one incredible year for Bay Area first-time feature filmmaker, writer-director, Sean Wang.
Last January, his first full feature-length film, Dìdi, (meaning “Younger Brother”) had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where it won the the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award and Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Cast. In the same week, his documentary short, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó, which premiered at the 2023 South by Southwest, where it won both the Grand Jury Award and Audience Award, was nominated for Best Documentary Short Film at the 96th Academy Awards.
Dìdi was also selected the Opening Night film at the San Francisco International Film Festival last April.
“It’s been it’s been a crazy few months. We had our hometown premiere of our movie…such a love letter to the Bay Area”, Wang exclaims the following day at the SFFILM Lounge to a small crowd after its Dìdi premiere, “Still kind of floating a little bit on cloud nine but it made me think about just the seeds of all of this.
Attending the Opening Night for Dìdi, Wang wore a sporty black blazer along with a white t-shirt proudly displaying Joan Chen’s name on it. The actress plays the loving immigrant mother to Chris, a thirteen year old teenage boy who makes his way through a series of firsts that his family can’t teach him (how to skate, how to flirt, and how to eventually how to love your mom) preceding his freshman year in high school.
Just turning 30 years old, Wang’s rise to success as a filmmaker came quite rapidly. Raised in the Bay Area in Fremont, California where his film was shot, which seems to becoming a popular location spot for movies these days with Indie filmmakers. It’s the second movie in the last two years to be released that features the East Bay’s fourth largest city, along with last year’s movie, Fremont.
“It was all on location, all in places that felt so hyper familiar to me,” Wang says. It fed not only into the personal story he wanted to tell, but also into his hopes to cement Fremont into the burgeoning contemporary canon of Bay Area films, from San Francisco’s Medicine for Melancholy and The Last Black Man in San Francisco to Oakland’s Sorry to Bother You and Blindspotting.
“They capture their cities, and the locations are so vivid and colorful and vibrant, and I thought, there is a story to be told in Fremont,” he says. “This story is maybe not as loud, but it’s just as emotional. I wanted to do something for my corner of the Bay Area.”
It’s also a love letter to all the coming-of-age films and to the directors of those films, that inspired him during the years such as “400 Blows”, “Fruitvale Station”, “Stand by Me”, “Short Term 12” and “Lady Bird”.
Dìdi is a semi-autobiographical film and opens up with a scene that all mischievous teenage boys can relate to; having the time of their lives by igniting neighborhood mailboxes and fleeing from getting caught. Thus sets the tone for Wang’s personal film.
Dìdi is set in the Summer of 2008 in Fremont, where Taiwanese-American Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) lives – in an all-female fatherless household, since dad is working abroad. All except his caring mother are somewhat dysfunctional with language and generation barriers that prevent them from fully understanding each other, especially with grandma at the dinner table.
With a cast of professional and first-time actors, the casting director should get special recognition as the ensemble was near perfect. Izaac Wang (Raya and the Last Dragon), who plays the lead as Chris Wang, seemed so natural and convincing that you would never have thought he was a real actor. Especially when working alongside veteran global icon, Joan Chen as his mother, one of the most respected actresses of Asian cinema, who is usually cast in flamboyant and dramatic roles, unlike the one she is here.
“It is a character that resonates very deeply with me.”, Chen says. “I am an immigrant mother who brought up two American children who had extremely tumultuous teen years…adolescence. I haven’t played the character like Chungsing (Chris’s mother) before; so gentle…warm…”
However, it was Chang Li Hua, Wang’s real life 86-year old grandmother (Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó), who may have stolen the show with the scene where Chris and his older sister (Shirley Chen) get into an intense verbal yelling match at the family dinner table, resulting in a side argument with the judgmental Chinese speaking grandmother condescending down on mother on the issue of how to properly raise kids. It was probably the film’s most hilarious moment.
“My grandma who had never been in a narrative film before, could act next to Joan and have it feel like the same movie,” says Wang, whose own 86-year old grandmother Chang Li Hua, plays Chris’s grandma in the film. “They share their most intense scenes together, and for a lot of actors of her caliber, it could be like, What is this movie with a bunch of first-time actors who have never acted before? This is beneath me. It was the total opposite. It was such a joy, such a dream. She would stay on set and do origami with my family.”
Director Sean Wang and Actress Joan Chen at a Q&A screening of Dìdi in San Francisco, July 29th, 2024. Photo by Marcus Siu
Wang’s path to becoming a filmmaker was untypical. As a teenager, he would shoot footage of his friends jumping off trees, then editing and adding music to it, and eventually posting it on YouTube. Wang confessed, “I didn’t know that was filmmaking until years and years and years later and it all traced back to skating for me. I fell in love with skating. It was something I truly have such a pure love for. It never left. I think that that skating just gave me ethos and introduced me to cameras and photography making skate videos.”
During those early years, Wang connected with the skating videos directed by Spike Jonze.
“He had made a skate video that was really emotional”, Wang reflects. “This is weird…Why am I crying watching a skate video?”, Wang questioned and replied back. “Because it’s Spike and that was the seed of everything! I don’t know what this is, but I could do this for 24 hours a day.” From that moment on, Wang knew he wanted to be a filmmaker.
He started making wedding videos and random commercials for local companies and was earning decent money while attending community college. When he went to USC, he realized that their school curriculum forced you to make a choice in a specific field in film school, but Wang wanted to be knowledgeable in every facet of filmmaking, and already knew he wanted to write and direct his own films.
He also initially realized that he didn’t want to waste his time to writing scripts that would require huge budgets that would probably never be made. Wang recalls doing a Google search for “movies made for under $1 million” and just started watching movies that were small in budget, such as Barry Jenkins’ “Medicine for Melancholy” and David Gordon Green’s “George Washington”.
“Oh! What are these feature films that are small independent films that look like they weren’t $200 million blockbusters? Maybe there’s a path through this side of things. They made these for so little – but they’re so amazing and just shoe box in production but not in emotion – and maybe I can go this route.”
Both of his films, Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó and Dìdi have something in common. They are packed with heart, honesty and emotion but on a shoe-string budget.
“I think those ideas, both of these films are so small and contained and somehow they ended up with a worldwide theatrical distribution plan”, Wang says. “The short got nominated for an Oscar. That must have been the cheapest nominated short of all time. We shot it with a crew of three people, so the fact those two were indies; so small and personal, all of a sudden having this giant platform and having it within months of one another, it just sort of feels like so unexpected. That’s not why we made it but I’m certainly thrilled that it happened.”
After graduating USC film school, Wang worked at Google’s Creative Lab in 2016 with a one year residency. His objective was to figure out his next step on how to make a feature-length movie without the obstacles that would normally burden the production. Wang was thinking at the time, “I do want to make a feature one day and I heard all these stories saying that it takes seven to eight years to get overnight success and I was like, man, if I’m gonna make a feature I should start now.”
From the looks of it with his first full-length feature, Dìdi, Sean Wang’s meteoric rise came right on schedule.
The film has a limited release Friday, but goes world wide after that.
As I was shifting through the RSA Conference 2024 program guide, with it’s impressive comprehensive five day agenda, there was an enormous amount of activities going on to easily fill anyone’s calendar as an attendee for the week. 33 keynote presentations given on two stages in the West and South Stages at the Moscone Center, 650 speakers across 425 sessions, the Expo floors in the South and North Halls had over 600 exhibitors.
As I glanced into the program’s “keynote” section, I noticed one that immediately caught my eye entitled “A Conversation with Actor, Comedian, and Writer, Jason Sudeikis, hosted by RSAC Chairman, Hugh Thompson. It read…
BELIEVE. The Ted Lasso Way has put smiles on the faces of millions worldwide, and maybe made us all a little kinder. A little more focused on teamwork and collaboration. A little more aware of the power of community, and the importance of mental health needs. And a lot more aware of the impact of an inspiring leader. Join this keynote as Jason Sudeikis shares insights, laughs, and inspiration.
As a huge fan of the show, I was curious to know how much knowledge the four-time Emmy Award Winner Jason Sudeikis had in the Cybersecurity field. As I entered Moscone West Hall and tried to find a seat, I discovered that most of the capacity crowd also probably wanted to know, as well.
The Executive chair of RSAC and host Hugh Thompson introduced Sudeikis to the much appreciative crowd at Moscone West, and immediately asked Sudeikis what inspired him to be an actor and performer.
“I saw Beverly Hills Cop when I was nine years old… it was very motivational to me and I knew that’s what I wanted … to be a black cop from Detroit.”, Sudeikis replied.
From that moment on, you knew it was going to be a fun-filled afternoon with plenty of laughs with the always very playful Thompson, as host.
BE CURIOUS – NOT JUDGEMENTAL
In a few minutes after the introduction, the lights were further darkened to show a clip from the episode, “Diamond Dogs”, from Season One/Episode 8 of Ted Lasso. They played the infamous darts scene that contained the famous Lasso quote “Be curious, not judgmental”, which perhaps may be one of the most representative quotes based on Ted Lasso’s character reportoire, that easily can be applied practically everywhere in so many different situations. Thompson asked Sudeikis what he wanted people to take away from that scene.
“I just wanted to be cheering for the good guys…like the fact that people have taken and used that in commencement speeches… and I think even some political speeches”, Sudeikis explained...“I’m not sure what politics exactly…that monologue spilled out of me in 1/2 hour… I’m sure everybody has versions of this I know people speak about it a lot in the arts…”
Hopefully, to many of the conference attendees, they can bring this idea of “be curious, not judgemental”, when dealing with others. They should never “judge” whether someone has the means to effect change by contribution, but rather be “curious” having the power to apply and transform change for the better. With the advent of A.I. already now being a major force in Cybersecurity technology, it helps to not be judgemental.
A conversation with Actor, Comedian and Writer, Jason Sudeikis hosted by Hugh Thompson at the RSAConference2024. Photo by Marcus Siu
ALL ABOUT NETWORKING:
At the very beginning of the RSA conference, Thompson encouraged all attendees in the audience to go out an meet new people in the giant RSAC community where people could learn and feed off each other. He presented a hypothetical scenario in the “mean streets” of San Francisco during lunchtime to Sudeikis to the audience: If he was in line at a taco truck stand and would want to connect with a person right next to him, what would be his top five “icebreakers”?
Though Sudeikis didn’t come up with five all together, he and the audience certainly did have alot fun listening to his brainstorming answers.
“Well, I think I’d go “rub bellies” and ask what taco you getting?” “Have you been to this taco truck before?” “You know where the hot spots are?” Or if they are wearing a badge maybe ask them something about that…the big laminates…I don’t know what information is on there but” Sudeikis continued, “I don’t speak “curious”, to know… I mean this is “Playground 101″, I’d ask them their name OK?”
In the middle of Sudeikis’ rant, Thompson asked if tapping a person was okay…
“I think tapping someone might feel a little aggressive. (audience laughs) It depends on the line…if it’s proper like the way like Germans line up, like right behind each other and very rigid (audience laughs) …but if it’s a little “loosey-goosey” and I don’t know, you know, then maybe, yeah”.
Sudeikis then playfully voice acts out two characters in line.
“I apologize for my own hunger because of my tummy.”
“Sorry to hear that…oh, I didn’t hear your stomach.”
“Oh, OK, well it was actually my butt.”
The audience roared with laughter.
“So much of this stuff though is really just about hitting the playing TV Upbeat like your kids… you hit the balloon over to them and you see if they hit it back.“
“Number five would be, “have you seen anything on television that you’ve enjoyed recently?” as Sudeikis glances into the crowd and says “They are all looking for recommendations, and they can always go on “Rotten Tomatoes” but let me ask you perfect strangers.”, Sudeikis explained.
“This is great…which would be great if the answer was “Perfect Strangers”?”
THE ADMINISTER OF LAUGHTER
When Thompson asked Sudeikis, what role humor plays when battling, stress, depression, or burnout, Sudeikis credits his ten year experience on Saturday Night Live, which he was a both a writer and featured performer, as well as various TV projects, shows, and movies.
He highly credited his grandmother during his upbringing, Loretta Wendt, (also mother of Actor George Wendt) who was a volunteer at the Little Company of Mary Hospital in the Southside of Chicago, for teaching him how important humor was to healing.
“It’s always really moving and compelling to me what good medicine laughter is and being an administer of such things or at least a vessel, these projects has always really knocked my socks off and it was something about my grandmother, Loretta Wendt, she worked it, did a lot of work “, Sudeikis continued, “A big part of it was all about how important humor was to healing and I do believe that in between laughter, sleeping and crying are the three best medicines that you’re not going to give any money to a pharmaceutical company. There’s a fourth one too, the love and appreciation and execution of the arts…”
Of course, Thompson couldn’t resist pitching his own “brilliant” idea to Sudeikis for kicking the Emyy Award show into the next level by introducing a new character into the series and possibly leading up to the season finale for Ted Lasso. The concept of a mildly bald, suave, (but not to suave) cybersecurity character from some exotic background like Jamaica or the Carribean, who stalks down a hacker somehow didn’t quite make a very convincing pitch, even with Thompson’s impressive background in the Cybersecurity field.
“Would anyone believe that a character like that really existed…as a person?”, Sudeikis questioned.
So it became pretty obvious after the interview was over that the very delightful Jason Sudeikis didn’t have much to say about the very latest in cybersecurity trends at the RSA Conference, but to give him some due credit, his alter ego Ted Lasso certainly didn’t know much about European soccer (futbal) in his first season, either…and look what can happen. In any case, it couldn’t have been a more fun-filled entertaining afternoon for the RSA conference attendees.
At the RSA 2024 event in San Francisco this year one of the key areas addressing the fintech marketplace both for banking and for institutional investors was security operating on a container basis.
Historically a lot of the applications for fintech were run on large servers and then they ended up running on distributed platforms but ending up operating through base web operations now with the advent of smartphones as the primary input device self-contained apps are the key data transfer mechanisms
These apps on the smartphones not only contain the data but also contain the programs that will be run and the reporting mechanisms to the government the banks and the user.
As Fintech moves to larger applications the security aspects and privacy aspects move to the forefront.
At the RSA 2024 event many companies were now showing that they could provide tracking and security solutions 4 containers and apps distributed across devices to be able to ensure the fintech community could operate in relative safety.
One of the leaders in this space is Aqua IT solutions which has a full product solution space for tracking use and the distribution of containers and their associated data from financial institution to user and back.
This is an important step as more companies move to add line account management handling their own credits and gift cards and the financing behind coupon systems
Also supported the solution is companies like Arista that has security built into there’s Software Controlled Networking Equipment, MasterCard which was showing their data intelligence group that helps interpret transaction verification, next DLP which is monitoring the data along the way to make sure that it is not interrupted or corrupted, and member companies from the Thoma Bravo group which has long supported the fintech community.
The ability to bring security to the container deployment marketplace is a key stop as embedded video, training and customer support is moving to more AI and less people base solutions.
Just like the movie industry from a year ago, the last twelve months have not been very kind to the video game industry. In contrast to the movie industry, where the pandemic single-handedly nearly ruined it with the “stay at home” order, video game sales spiked and reached unprescented highs, but soon plummeted as the pandemic slowly went away. Sales could not be sustained, which is why gaming companies had to make cuts in order to survive. Games in production were cancelled, studios shut their doors, as thousands of workers suddenly found themselves without a job.
Unfortunately, massive job layoffs started last quarter, with well over 10,000 jobs lost, and an additional 8,000 jobs were lost in the first quarter of this year. The industry has never experienced this much devastation ever. Even the big companies were vulnerable, as Sony Interactive Entertainment laid off 1,000 people in their last two quarters and Epic Games, laid off almost as many in just one day last year. As of today, layoffs still continue to worry the entire industry.
Even the prestigious E3 Conference, the most highly anticipated video game industry event in the country had to halt its operations a few years ago due to the the pandemic. It’s actual last live event was in 2019, the year before the pandemic hit. After the pandemic was over, the industry’s biggest names had pulled themselves out, such as Microsoft and Sony, two of the three biggest gaming console companies out there.
Indie games showcased at the IGF Pavilion at GDC2024 at the Moscone Convention Center. Photo by Marcus Siu.
WELCOME TO GDC 2024
This year, the Game Developer’s Conference, known as GDC, helped fill the empty void in the world of gaming conferences, at least in California and the West Coast. However, since the pandemic, companies continued to pull out conferences over the last few years. It became obvious that there just wasn’t a whole lot of new product to promote on the Expo floor compared to the pre-pandemic years.
Notably absent at GDC 2024 were Amazon Web Services and Sony Interactive Entertainment. Unity and Google were present, but did not have any product demos on the Expo floor. At least Epic – Unreal and Meta were at the show with their latest product demos.
One can easily make an argument that 2-D gaming that utilizes Unity isn’t as impressive as the heavy-weight large-scale advanced projects that Unreal Engine has or even the games coming from Meta using their latest Meta Quest 3 VR headset which is geared for Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the Metaverse.
Regardless of the turnout on the floor, this year’s conference held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco still registered nearly 30,000 attendees from all walks of life from around the globe, which was about 2,000 more than a year before. The 730 nonstop sessions, workshops, and roundtable discussions to kept game developers busy for the entire week.
The Expo floor still was quite active mostly with Indie games, where you can play them as well as meet with the games creators and developers. In addition, hundreds of exhibitors were showing off there latest wares and tools, depending on your project needs. There were also various networking parties at separate off-site venues scattered around the city in a more relaxing atmostphere, as well.
Attendees came to meet, learn, and connect…and they did.
A GDC NEWBIE: MEET ALEX CRANE
Alex Crane in front of the entrance at Moscone Convention Center for GDC2024. Photo by Marcus Siu
Alex Crane, a 2019 graduate from the University of Kansas with a B.S. in computer science, was unsure what to expect at his first ever GDC. However, he was certain about achieving his ultimate goal; to be a game producer, project lead for a game company, or find another indie studio in the Midwest. He expressed what his intentions were while attending the GDC conference.
“My goals here were definitely to attend a lot of talks and learn a lot. I attempted to start an indie studio in the past…so attending talks about people who have done the same…figure out where we went wrong, what we could have done better…it would have been good attending talks at bigger companies and learn a lot about game development.”, Crane explained.
While an undergraduate, Crane’s background included a game project called “No Lives Left”, (much like the style of the classic game “The Legend of Zelda”), a meta imagining of what would happen if your games kept on going without you. Though he had regrets on not having completed the project during the three years he worked on it, he still gained tremendous knowledge in game design and its development, as well as having experience as a project lead for over thirty developers, engineers, and artists while using Unreal Engine 4.
At the same time, he became the President and Events chair for the “KU Game Developers Association” for the University of Kansas and has hosted many hackathons and jam events, such as “Game Jam”, which he is currently the Midwest Regional Organizer overseeing eight U.S. states for the “Global Game Jam”, an event that spans the entire world. In addition to having the opportunity to connect with professors who teach game design, as well as IGDA (International Game Developer’s Association) members, Crane was an organizer for “Flyaway Indies” and “Amber Waves of Games”, which is dedicated to connecting and showcasing video game developers who live in the Midwestern United States all through a discord server.
Even with all his Midwest connections, Crane was somewhat disappointed not having the opportunity to meet or connect with some of the bigger name game companies at GDC 2024, especially on the Expo floor.
“There’s a few of the bigger names and then not much else other than third party software that assists with the development of games as opposed to companies that develop games or game engines”, Crane continued. “You’ve got Epic and Unity here, a couple of other bigger names but I was expecting a bit more of that…Microsoft has their thing upstairs but it’s just for swag. They don’t really have recruiters here or anything or any of that. I didn’t know what to expect though since it’s my first time.”
However, as far as networking and connecting with other game developers from around the country, Crane found GDC to be quite useful. “I was surprised to meet so many people from the Midwest. I didn’t know there were so many developers in Wisconsin and Michigan. I wasn’t actually aware some companies have some campuses there.”, Crane remarked.
Indeed, out of all the advantages that the conference has to offer, connecting and networking is a huge plus at GDC. Despite all the gloom and doom around the Gaming industry now even more vulnerable than ever with the threat of A.I. in the horizon, it hopefully won’t stop the 30,000 attendees who like Crane, have drive and passion to pursue their dreams as game developers.
The world certainly needs them.
Meta Quest demo booth at GDC 2024. Photo by Marcus Siu.
20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL
directed, produced and filmed by MSTYSLAV CHERNOV. Courtesy of PBS
When watching the evening news every night on television with its almost repetitive nature of headlines covering yet another senseless mass killing somewhere in the U.S, I often hear criticism from others claiming there is hardly any media coverage in other parts of the world whose acts are even more tragic and horrific.
This is true, especially in those countries that do not represent human rights and whose brutal leaders do not want the “truth” to be exposed, especially when they are hiding possible war crimes. Such is the case in Ukraine, with the Russian invasion of the city of Mariupol.
The public takes it for granted that media covers just about everything with the utmost detail in the free world, but in reality, they have very little knowledge of what types of obstacles that journalists are up against in many corners of the world. Media certainly has its limitations with communications and can possibly spread misinformation or even disinformation that follows a propaganda agenda.
This is why director Mstyslav Chernov made “20 Days of Mariupol”.
“20 Days of Mariupol” is one of those rare films that shows the challenges that war-journalists have to face. Chernov, who also produced and shot the film, gives us a humanistic, yet non-sympathetic first person perspective of the ongoing crisis span during the first twenty days of the Russia-Ukraine war that your nightly news cannot possibly summarize, even if they had all of the footage sent to them on a timely basis each night for the broadcast.
Chernov had forty minutes of his footage published on television, but still had a good thirty hours of unused footage that would be used for the source of his documentary, which won the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival nearly a year ago.
“I wanted to do more with that because the scale was so huge and you can’t really show that with news pieces”, Chernov continues, “We live in age of not just misinformation but misinterpretation…to persist that misinterpretation we need much more context for better understanding in the audience.”
“That’s where documentary films are becoming to be so important that they they give more than just one or two minute news pieces which can be overwhelming, but still you see them and you forget”, Cerno explained. “I kept meeting people who escaped from Mariupol who carried this city within them, but the city was did not exist anymore, so the city was just there in in their hearts. Making this film was also a way to to preserve it as it was being bombed and destroyed, but still existed. It was the way to preserve Mariupol in history, as well”.
20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL directed, produced and filmed by MSTYSLAV CHERNOV. Courtesy of PBS
Along with Chernov, the film documents his AP (Associated Press) team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol as they struggle to continue their work documenting atrocities of the Russian invasion. As the only international reporters who remain in the city, they capture what later become defining images of the war: dying children, mass graves, the bombing of a maternity hospital, and more.
The film also draws on Chernov’s daily news dispatches and personal footage of his own country at war. It offers a vivid, harrowing account of civilians caught in the siege, as well as a window into what it’s like to report from a conflict zone, and the impact of such journalism around the globe.
Chernov also serves as the narrator of the film and in spite of its subject matter, he does so in a calm fashionable manner. This was done after he realized he was imposing his emotions to the audience on the first take. His team agreed that his narration should sound like he would in a normal conversation, regardless of what was on screen. His narration reminds me of how Werner Herzog would narrate as an effective storyteller in his films, and it worked extremely well for this documentary.
Chernov initially emerged in 2008 as a fine arts photographer shooting in as many as forty different countries and winning awards all around the world. In 2013, he became the President of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPF) and eventually started documentary multi-format (photo/video/text) working in journalism for the Associated Press, as well as being a war correspondent covering international conflicts and novelist known for his coverage of the Revolution of Dignity, War in Donbas, the downing of flight MH17, Syrian civil war, and the Battle of Mosul in Iraq.
He recently received the Pulitzer Prize for his work, shared with Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko, and Lori Hinnant, for the Ukraine coverage. In addition, “20 Days of Mariupol” had just been selected last week as one of the fifteen shortlisted films to be elgible for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature film, as well as being shortlisted for International Feature film representing the country of Ukraine.
Unlike most documentaries, it is free to stream and accessible to everyone on YouTube above. It is also available on the PBS app. and is also available on DVD. Regardless of its bleak nature, this is essential viewing for everyone.
(L-R) Rick Goldsmith interviews Director Mstyslav Chernov at a screening of “20 Days of Mariupol” in San Francisco. Photo by Marcus Siu.
