Heavy is an educational technologist, academic, and digital artist living in Southern California. Deriving his pseudonym from his penchant for philosophical discussion, Heavy possesses an interdisciplinary background that comprises technology, academia, and the arts. With a PhD in Humanities [ Intermedia Analysis ] from the Universiteit van Amsterdam, he has worked as both a university professor and a tech developer in Anaheim, Prague, and Saint Louis. Since 2007, Heavy has internationally presented his academic work, which explores the intersection of emerging technologies and semiotics in public space.

As a kind of synthesis between scholarly inquiry and emerging media, Heavy founded The Heavy Projects to investigate how the fusion of creativity and technology can uncover new modes of relaying ideas. Building upon existing technological and theoretical frameworks, Heavy creates innovative interfaces between digital design and physical worlds in ways that provoke the imagination.

Todd Richmond is head of the Advanced Prototypes Group at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). He received a degree in chemistry from the University of San Diego, and went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech, with postdoctoral fellowship at the U.C. San Francisco. In 1995, he accepted a position as a chemistry professor at The Claremont Colleges where early in his faculty career he incorporated multimedia and Web technologies into his teaching/research. That work led him to evolve from his specific focus on chemistry to instead pursue a broader understanding of technology and content. This accelerated in 2000 when transitioning to run the USC Annenberg Center. In 2006 Todd moved to the ICT and currently he works in a variety of areas: future environments for communication/collaboration, counter-IED and situational awareness training; immersive technologies; interactive education; visualization.