Speakers
Aleksander Franiczek
Aleksander Franiczek is an independent scholar and educator who recently completed his PhD in English at the University of Waterloo. His main research topics include the textuality and practice of narrative design in video games, digital roleplaying, and critical media studies. As a game studies researcher and retro game enthusiast, he believes in the necessity of interdisciplinary perspectives and collaborations to better account for the co-dependence of the technical and artistic aspects of videogames. He is also a writer and podcaster for the game criticism website RPGFan.
Femke Kocken
Femke Kocken is a Dutch researcher and designer with a background in Industrial Design from Eindhoven University of Technology and research experience at Concordia University in Montréal. Her work explores the relationship between humans, technology, and the world, with a particular interest in internet culture, AI, speculative design, and digital aesthetics. Through both research and design, she investigates how interaction design and visual systems shape the way we experience (digital) worlds.
Gregory Nacu
Gregory Naçu is the creator of C64 OS and the founder of OpCoders Inc. A lifelong Commodore enthusiast, he began programming after discovering a broken VIC-20 at age five and receiving a Commodore 64 at age nine. In the late 1990s, he became active in the Commodore community, attending Commodore Expos and developing software for the SuperCPU and the WiNGs operating system. After returning to the scene years later, he set out to bring a modern, mouse-driven computing environment to the Commodore 64, leading to the creation of C64 OS—a powerful operating system enhancement written in 6502 assembly language and developed on a Commodore 128.
Supercharge your C64 with C64 OS
Martin Robillard
Martin Robillard is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University. His research is in software engineering, with an emphasis on the human aspects of software development and code quality. A passionate Java programmer for 30 years, he is the author of the book “Introduction to Software Design with Java” and the maintainer of the JetUML software modeling tool and the codesample.info website.
Leo Binkowski
Leo Binkowski is a software developer and one of the original programmers behind the NABU computer network, an early online home-computer system developed in Canada in the early 1980s. He joined the NABU software team shortly after high school and worked from 1982 to 1986, developing arcade-style games and software for the platform. Over the years, his original source code, development materials, and software archives have played a major role in preserving the history of the NABU system. More recently, Leo has helped lead modern efforts to restore and document the NABU platform through the NABU RetroNET preservation project, where he has shared original code, hardware, and historical insight with the retro-computing community. He has also presented at major vintage-computing events such as the Vintage Computer Festival East, where he speaks about the development of early online computing and his experience working on the NABU network at the beginning of the home-computer era.
Leo Binkowski is visiting Concordia to demonstrate the NABU Network, the only family-oriented computer invented entirely in Canada. The discovery of a large cache of brand-new computers never distributed has sparked a worldwide adventure to recover and restore the software, as well as to connect it to the modern age
Giuseppe Destefanis
Giuseppe Destefanis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL), where he is part of the Financial Computing and Analytics group, and Co-Head of the London SmartBridgeLab. His research covers Empirical Software Engineering, Mining Software Repositories, Large Language Models, and Blockchain technologies. He focuses on improving software quality and the developer experience, and on examining how new AI tools can support software engineering and be integrated into organisational practice.
Frédérick Maheux
Frédérick Maheux is a noise musician and practice-based researcher whose work weaves together technological détournement, transgression, and critical theory. After probing digital subcultures through the feature documentaries Art/Crime (2011), ANA (2015), and Drug Porn (2018), he has, since 2020, shifted his focus toward experimental video games such as Exophilie and AI-driven interactive installations like Cyborg T.A.R.O.T., interrogating noise, glitch, and post-human speculation.
A doctoral candidate in communication at UQAM, Maheux studies how noise functions within creative and collaborative processes through game-based research-creation. His projects have been presented at festivals and conferences, including ECRÃ, iDMAa, DiGRA, and Beyond Humanism. His latest article, Au-delà des art games : la transposition vidéoludique de l’espace d’exposition comme expansion de l’œuvre artistique, appears in Pour d’autres espèces d’espace (Châtelet et al., 2025).