He had performed a similar function on other science fiction films, such as Logan's Run, and some of the early Star Trek movies.
He has considerable screen time for an extra, playing the notes on the synthesizer under the direction of several scientists and musicians, and gazing raptly up at the alien spaceship.
In his original script, with the working title of Watch the Skies, Spielberg had written these as two separate parts, but combined them into one character during filming.
He was the chief architect of the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) under the guidance of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative, a project of the United States Department of Defense.
The ADL SCORM is widely perceived as a means to achieve interoperability, accessibility and reuse of the component pieces of web-based instruction, irrespective of Learning Management Systems.