Dr. Bates has spent the past 15 years working to help create a new medium of entertainment and advertising, based on technically advanced interactive characters and story. He sees the medium as having artistic, technical, and economic parallels to Walt Disney's development of character animation in the 1930s. Dr. Bates received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University, and bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science from Johns Hopkins University at age seventeen. He has taught at Cornell, the MIT AI Laboratory, and, from 1987 to 1997, as a professor in the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department, where he remains an Adjunct Professor.

Dr. Bates is a leading international advocate for artificial intelligence-based entertainment, and a leading researcher. He is well published, is invited to speak frequently, and has lectured at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Columbia, USC, UC Berkeley, CalArts, Keio, Edinburgh, Sony, Mitsubishi, NHK, Fujitsu, Philips, Disney, Pixar, Time-Warner, Microsoft, and elsewhere, and in numerous national and international R&D and business conferences. Prior to Zoesis, Dr. Bates co-founded two software companies. At Zoesis, he is Chairman, and also participates in business development, including sales, strategy, and partnering. He participates in and co-leads R&D, and serves as Producer on artistic efforts.