Chris Satchell, the chief technology officer and executive vice president for game platforms and development at International Game Technology, might be onto something.

On Friday, May 14, Satchell will be the keynote speaker at the IGT-University of Nevada, Reno Engineering Symposium. Satchell’s speech is the appropriately titled, “Separated at Birth: Video Games and Gambling.”

Satchell is one of several speakers who will focus on the many intersections that exist between games and gaming.

In addition to Satchell, who before his current career at IGT enjoyed a long career in video games, including Microsoft’s Xbox 360 development, several notable nationally known figures on the subject will be featured.

They include:

Ioannis Pavlidis, Eckhard-Pfeiffer Professor and director of the Computational Physiology Lab at the University of Houston. His research interests are in stress, sleep studies and health games. He’s the director of the Stress and Walk n’ Play projects.

Michael Neff, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Program in Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis. Neff’s research focuses on understanding and modeling human movement.

The annual symposium begins at 10 a.m. and runs to 3:30 p.m. in the Mathewson-IGT Knowledge Center’s Room 124.

Satchell’s keynote is scheduled for 10:10 a.m. A panel discussion on the future of gaming will be held at 11:15 a.m. Pavlidis will speak at 1:15 p.m. on “A Novel Way to Conduct Human Studies and Do Some Good.” Neff’s 2:20 p.m. talk is entitled, “Making Characters Gesture with Personality.”

For more information or to register, contact Eelke Folmer in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at efolmer@cse.unr.edu