North Side Inc. – the team
North Side has a multidisciplinary team of researchers/software developers and artists who work together on an immersive, genre-defining video game franchise. The work environment is open and informal.
On the R&D side, our team members typically hold advanced degrees in Computational Linguistics or Computer Science. Our software developers/researchers do advanced work, either in the Artificial Intelligence/Language Understanding and Generation areas, or the 3D real-time interactive graphics area. We integrate both technologies to build Intelligent Agents aware of their environment.
Our art and content teams develop the 3D assets and textual databases used in our Bot Colony video game. The Closed-Beta of Bot Colony is expected to start in the summer of 2011.
North Side welcomes applications from people who are experienced in the areas we work in. These include - Parsing, Large-scale ontological engineering, WSD (Word-sense disambiguation), Co-reference resolution, Reasoning, Dialog Management, Language Generation/Summarization, Automated Knowledge acquisition, developing visual programming environments. In the AI side of the house we use the Versant OODBMS and SQL databases in a Java/Eclipse environment. - Game engine (OpenGL/C++) , game-play programming (we use controlled-English to script the game), network programming and experience in MMO development (Apache/Mina), multimedia asset management, build and testing management.
If you believe you have what it takes to join us, review open positions on the Careers page and use the Contact form.
Eugene Joseph
Eugene is the founder of North Side Inc. of Montreal, Canada. Eugene has been leading the company’s R&D work in natural language understanding and natural language generation since 2002. North Side’s conversation pipeline is used in its forthcoming Bot Colony title ( www.botcolony.com) , an online adventure videogame. The development of Bot Colony started in October 2007. Eugene also leads R&D groups working on real-time 3D interaction and visualization software, used in the Bot Colony simulation-driven game engine, and knowledge-acquisition. Eugene’s Bot Colony novel was published in December 2010 and is available on www.amazon.com .
North Side is Eugene’s second entrepreneurial venture focused on human-computer interface. He founded Virtual Prototypes (now Presagis at www.presagis.com ) in 1985, where he invented VAPS, now the de facto standard for display design and automated software generation, as well as flexible simulation tools. On April 21, 1999 Eugene was inducted into the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum AW&ST; Laureate Hall of Fame as the 1999 Electronics Laureate, for causing a paradigm shift in display development and simulation in aerospace. Virtual Prototypes went public on TSE in July 1999, and was later acquired by CAE.
Eugene’s long-range technology plans revolve around concept animation, which means visualizing the semantics of text using real-time 3D graphics, and interacting with intelligent agents aware of their environment. This is actually the core technology powering the Bot Colony game. The company plans to release this technology commercially to enable workflow/operations simulation and visualization, user generated content and film pre-visualization.