We’re going to be hosting the academic/industry crossover conference ‘Game On‘ here in Galway this year. My academic colleague Colm asked me to help out on the organising team, which I’m happy to do since I know he’ll run a tight ship and I’ll only need to row in behind him 
It was only really last year that I learned that valid academic research can include computer games – this was somewhat a revelation to me, as it gives me a way to combine my two major interests into a ‘win-win’. Last year I was at a ‘Serious Games’ conference in Portugal, with a PhD student talking about our work with neural networks and image processing in the development of a ‘social agent’ for online communication tools; I also presented a paper at an AI conference in which I talked about the use of Genetic Algorithms in Darkwind to train the computer to drive races more competitively. You can download the research paper here.
This is a win-win I plan to continue with.. I’ll probably put something together about the collaborative ‘virtual whiteboard’ tools in VRCGroups, for the Game On conference itself.