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Science Fiction Book Talk/Signing by Dr. Anthony Francis

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Tech alum and author Dr. Anthony Francis will give a talk and sign copies of his two science fiction novels, Frost Moon and Blood Rock, the first two installments of The Skindancer Series. One attendee will win a pass to this year's Dragon*Con, Sept. 2-5 in Atlanta, where Francis will also be in attendance.

In 2011, Frost Moon received an EPIC award for Fantasy/Paranormal Fiction from the Electronic Publishing Industry Coalition, the oldest competition honoring eBooks and the ePublishing industry. EPIC is a premier event for authors and publishing houses.

About Francis

By day, Dr. Anthony G. Francis, Jr., studies human and other minds to help build intelligent machines and emotional robots; by night, he writes science fiction and draws comic books at the intersection of science fiction and pure fantasy.

His research explores how memory and context interact with each other to enable agents to focus on the things most important to their current situations. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in 2000 for research on context sensitive memory for planning, reading and information retrieval.

His professional work on information retrieval began with an Emory search spinoff, continued at the Georgia Tech spinoff, Enkia, which he founded with his thesis advisor and another graduate student, and is ongoing at the Search Engine That Starts With A G, where he has worked on ranking, custom search and robots.

His work with robotics also began at Tech, where he participated in a project to develop a robot pet. This sparked an interest in artificial intelligence for games and on the relationship of memory and emotion, work he continues at the Search Engine That Starts With A G through its Cloud Robotics initiative.

Anthony has been writing for over 30 years. His first published story was the science fiction short "Sibling Rivalry"; more recently he has focused on urban fantasy in the Dakota Frost series and branched out into steampunk for the upcoming anthology UnCONventional (pdf).

Anthony began drawing around when he began writing, and he's been reading comics for the entire time. His webcomic, f@nu fiku is on temporary hiatus while he's finishing the first Dakota Frost trilogy, but he also participates in 24 Hour Comics Day every year and is trying to help people succeed at it through the website BlitzComics.

You can keep up with the latest from Anthony at his blog where he explores the intersection of artificial intelligence, physics, genetics, nanotechnology, fandom, and life.

Status

  • Workflow Status:Published
  • Created By:Tearanny Street
  • Created:08/22/2011
  • Modified By:Fletcher Moore
  • Modified:10/07/2016

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