Professor, Computational Media
Magy Seif El-Nasr is a Professor and Department Chair of Computational Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she directs the Game User Interaction and Intelligence (GUII) Lab. Dr. Seif El-Nasr earned her Ph.D. degree from Northwestern University in Computer Science in 2003. Her research focuses on developing automated tools and techniques for authoring, adapting, and personalizing virtual environments (e.g., interactive narrative, believable agents, and games) and developing evidence-based methodologies to measure the effectiveness of game environments by developing novel process mining and visual analytics systems. She collaborated with several game companies, both in the serious and entertainment game spaces. She published the first book on Game Analytics, called Game Analytics: Maximizing the Value of Player Data. She recently published a new textbook called Game Data Science, outlining the standard methods used for data science within game research and industry. Her work is internationally known and cited in many communities, including HCI, graphics, affective computing, and game research.
Additionally, she has received several awards and recognition within the HCI, Agents, and games research communities. Notably, she received five Best Paper Awards, one exceptional paper, and three honorable mentions. Further, she was named a HEVGA (Higher Education Video Game Alliance) Fellow. She is also an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Games, IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, and Human-Computer Interaction.