On 29th of October, the MED GAIMS project will deliver a presentation during the Lucca Games & Comics, a major event comic book and gaming convention held each year in the city of Lucca, Italy. 

During the session entitled “Playable cities: transforming cities through games”, MED GAIMS will shed light on how different countries and different cultural heritages are using and implementing new products - the games - to enhance their tourism offer. MED GAIMS will draw on its gamification experience thus far and will highlight the mission and deliverables of the MED GAIMS project in the context of Gamification towards Playable Cities.

This year, the Lucca Games & Comics event will be held in in two modalities, online and physical. To learn more about MED GAIMS and its vision, join our speakers: Daniel Asmar, Maria Giovanna Fara, and Xavi Socías. Note that the presentation will be in English with simultaneous translation into Italian.

For more information, please visit this link.
 

Maria Giovanna Fara is an expert in desing and management in the cultural and tourist field. Graduated in Communication in Siena and in Cultural Management in Venice, she carried out research activities in cultural planning at IUAV in Venice. She is in charge of planning and programming area at Fondazione Alghero | Musei Eventi Turismo Arte in Alghero, an organization that manages on behalf of the Municipality of Alghero - its reference partner - the policies for the enhancement of Alghero historical, archaeological and cultural heritage . Always passionate about video games, she deepens her knowledge of games as a tool for the enhancement of heritage and urban development by participating as a co-designer in Med Gaims, a cooperation project in the Euro-Mediterranean area funded by the ENI CBC MED 2014-2020 program of which Fondazione Algghero is the only Italian partner along with other organizations from Lebanon, Jordan and Spain. 

Daniel Asmar is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the American University of Beirut.  Daniel received his Ph.D. in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2006.  Daniel’s research interests are in Computer Vision, Robotics, and Digital Technologies in Cultural Heritage. Specifically, he has interests in visual perception, autonomous robot navigation and mapping, environment representation and recognition, augmentation techniques in archeology, and segmentation methods in Computer Vision. He has several publications in these areas in refereed journals and conference proceedings. Daniel is an ASME member, a senior member in IEEE, and was the founder of the joint IEEE Lebanese chapter in Robotics and Automation, Instrumentations and Measurements, and Control Systems.  Daniel is a member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) council on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Virtual and Augmented Reality    

Xavi Socías believes in games and the mechanics derived from games as a tool to improve people and organisations. He is the creator and founder of Cheap Films (2014), a company that turns cinematographic events into a tool for team dynamics, revitalising spaces, presentations and disclosures. He has been the director of the Pyrenees Game Festival (La Seu d’Urgell, 2015), a founding partner of Quimera Entertainment Company (2018), a game event management company, and a co-director of the Tona Game Game Fair (2018). He is currently Project Manager of the MedGaims Project in Neàpolis, the Innovation Agency in Vilanova y la Geltrú.