The group focuses on the problem of building interactive animated characters for use in virtual environments such as immersive story-telling systems, games, and web-based worlds. His research is on the development of an ethologically-inspired architecture for building autonomous animated creatures which live in 3D virtual worlds. Blumberg did his doctoral work at the MIT Media Lab in the Autonomous Agents group under the direction of Professor Pattie Maes and received his PhD in 1996. He is one of the chief architects of the ALIVE project at the Media Lab. Previously he worked at Apple, Inc., as product manager for the LaserWriter, and at NeXT, Inc., where he was the first employee after the founders. He has presented papers at SIGGRAPH and at AI and ALife conferences.