CSI at Gencon 50


Next week SoIC staff and students from both The Center for Security Informatics and Data Sciences will be attending Indianapolis’ Gencon 50 at the Indy Convention Center. Gencon is a four-day gaming convention. It is both the oldest and largest gaming convention in the world. This year’s event is expected to top last year’s attendance of 60,000 visitors. Multiple floors of gaming rooms and 500 vendor booths will support a well-educated and creative community who are both well versed and interested in computer technology.

Recognizing the marketing opportunity that Gencon presents, our SoIC teams will go with the goals of raising brand recognition for our centers and recruitment of both students and IRB candidates, as well as making contacts with state and local businesses. In previous years, CIS’s team has made hundreds of contacts and passed out thousands of promotional materials over the space of the four-day conference.

This year’s planned effort reflects a belief that a better approach would be a multifaceted, cross center effort with targeted marketing that elevates a different center’s visibility on each day of the event. We thought that this year, in addition to CSI, other SoIC centers should bring in their teams and materials to share their united but unique offerings to a community of new friends. As organizer, Joshua Streiff, likes to say about the event:

We did not want to have all the fun, and as one big SoIC family, we knew a partnership approach made the most sense. This gives the maximum opportunity for our center ambassadors to talk with attendees and share who we are, what we do, and why they should get involved with us.

Our joint presence will begin on Thursday, August 17th and run until Saturday, August 19th. Our various teams will rotate through the promotional time while also getting the opportunity to move about the rooms and floors enjoying the event. While the teams explore Gencon, they will also be flying the IU flag throughout the entire event. We expect our teams to encounter large numbers of potential students and IRB candidates in this fertile, fun environment full of computer and gaming connected folk.

It is going to be a great time for Gencon, CSI, and Data Sciences.