R. Benjamin Knapp is the Founding Executive Director of the Virginia Tech Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT). For more than 30 years Dr. Knapp has been a leader and researcher at the nexus of the arts and technology. He is one of original co-founders of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (A2RU), the Principal Investigator in an NEA Research Lab focused on arts and innovation, and co-convenor of the 2024 National Summit on Creativity, Empathy, and AI. Throughout his career, his research has focused on the development and design of user-interfaces that allow both composers and performers to augment the physical control of a musical instrument with direct sensory interaction. He is the co-inventor of the BioMuse system, showcased at the very first CyberArts festival in Los Angeles, which enabled artists to use gesture, cognition, and emotional state to interact with audio and video media. His recent research also includes reimagining immersive audio by placing speakers in the liminal spaces between the listener and the surrounding architecture.