Dr. Pratheep Paranthaman
Timeline

Career Path

Associate Professor of Computer Science / Coordinator, Game Design Minor
Elon University — Elon, North Carolina, USA

Teaching game design and development, and coordinating the multidisciplinary Game Design minor program.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Elon University — Elon, North Carolina, USA

Joined Elon University's Computer Science department teaching game design and development courses, ahead of later promotion to Associate Professor.

Postdoctoral Researcher / Lecturer
Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University — Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Worked in the Games User Research (GUR) domain, exploring player experience in games. Developed a prototype framework called ARAPID ("As Rapid As Possible Iterative Design"), using online crowdsourcing, Unity, and AWS to tighten the iteration loop between game design and user testing — collapsing a process that traditionally took days to weeks down to minutes.

Visiting Scientist
College of Computer Science, Northeastern University — Boston, Massachusetts, USA — Jan 2018 to Mar 2018

Researched Game Analytics and player behavior estimation. Built "Cyborg — 2D," a 2D platformer in Unity, with AWS-backed analytics (DynamoDB, S3) and Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing integrated directly into the Unity interface.

Ph.D., Science and Technology for Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering
University of Genoa — Genoa, Italy

Thesis: "The Design and Implementation of Serious Games for Driving and Mobility." Centered on improving driver behavior through social serious games and gamification. Part of the EU-FP7 project TEAM (Tomorrow's Elastic Adaptive Mobility), collaborating with VTT (Finland), Objective (Germany), and ICCS (Greece), with field tests in Genoa, ASTA Zero (Sweden), and CRF (Italy).

Robotics Engineer
Lema Labs Technologies, IIT Madras Research Park — Chennai, India

Delivered lectures on autonomous robotics, mentored students building robots from scratch, supported R&D and prototype testing, developed course content, and helped hire and train new technical staff.

M.S. in Artificial Intelligence
Heriot-Watt University — Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Dissertation on Human-Robot Interaction using the NAO Torso Humanoid robot — building and comparing two multimodal (speech + vision) interaction prototypes. Awarded the "Best Poster Prize for the Most Innovative Project in MSc Cohort" by the MACS department.

B.Tech, Information Technology
Anna University — Chennai, India

Completed undergraduate studies in Information Technology at Anna University.