Exploring Realtime Conversational Virtual Characters

Aansh Malik is an AI engineer on the emerging and creative technologies team at WarnerMedia, Burbank, CA. His work focuses on leveraging advancements in AI to enable more interactive storytelling, facilitate experiences in immersive mediums such as AR/VR, as well as augmenting current workflows in the media production lifecycle. His projects are a confluence of fields including reinforcement learning in game engines, computer vision, recurrent neural networks for audio processing, among others. He received a BS degree in electrical engineering with a specialization in machine learning from the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, CA.

Michael Zink is the vice president of emerging and creative technologies at WarnerMedia, Burbank, CA, where he is responsible for exploring emerging technologies to enhance WarnerMedia’s storytelling capabilities across different platforms. This includes assessing the latest technologies, developing innovative experiences, and integrating new solutions into creative production workflows. He also participates in several industry associations, serves as the president and chairman for the UHD Alliance and Education, and the Vice President for SMPTE. Prior to joining Warner Bros., in 2014, he worked at Technicolor London, U.K., and Los Angeles, CA, for over ten years, most recently as the vice president of technology strategy, where he was responsible for launching the production efforts around various new distribution formats and adoption of Technicolor technology solutions within industry groups. Earlier in his career, he worked for several media production facilities in Germany.