Grand Text Auto

Adam Smith (also of EIS) and I are organizing a new workshop to be co-located with AIIDE 2011 on the intersection of AI and game design. Game AI usually refers to controlling interesting agents in a game world, but this workshop is focused on how AI can assist during the game design process itself. Our belief is that bringing concerns from design studies, computational creativity, and game production into contact with AI can result in a radically new and productive view of AI in games.

In August 2010, the first ever Mario level generation competition was held at the Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG) conference. The contest involved generating a personalized level for a particular player, using metrics from a player’s  prior playthrough of a different level. There were three entries from the Expressive Intelligence Studio, including the winner, Ben Weber!

However, this competition had only the CIG audience as participants and judges. Julian Togelius and Noor Shaker at ITU Copenhagen have now opened up the competition for the general public to participate. The goal is to gather more (and more detailed) data on the differences between the generated levels and players’ preferences between them. We invite everyone to participate in these experiments!

Building on the great success from last year, we are pleased to announce that there will be a second workshop on Procedural Content Generation in Games, to be held this coming June 28 in Bordeaux, France, co-located with FDG 2011. The workshop focuses on advancing the state of the art in computational techniques for creating content for computer games by bringing together researchers to discuss novel research and important issues in procedural content generation. The deadline for long and short papers is March 11, 2011.

Overview

“Acting for embodied interactive narrative”

Ken Perlin, NYU

Date: July 16th, 2010
Time: 1:15pm
Place: Engineering 2, Room 192

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the School of Engineering.

Abstract

The transition from game play to emotionally believable embodied interactive protagonist-driven narrative requires something more radical than better animation blending or motion capture.  It requires rethinking the process of virtual acting from the ground up.  We must abandon linear thinking altogether and create virtual actors that can move, emote, interact and respond in real time with plausible expression, emotion and body language.

“Developing Games for 2020″
Bob Mitchell, ohai

Date: Thursday, February 25th
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Noah Wardrip-Fruin

Abstract
Students at UC Santa Cruz today will be among the engineers, artists, designers, and producers leading game teams in 2020.Review some of the changes to interactive entertainment over the last ten years in order to look ahead to the possibilities in 2020. The most obvious changes will be in the hardware our games run on. The more difficult predictions will be figuring out what our players want from their games.

“Players are Artists, Too”
Henry Lowood, Stanford University

Date: Thursday, February 18th
Time: 2:00pm
Place: Digital Media Theater, UCSC
Hosted By: Noah Wardrip-Fruin

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for the Digital Media Theater.

“Animating the Gesture Style of Particular Individuals”
Michael Neff, UC Davis

Date: Friday, February 12th
Time: 12:00pm
Place: Engineering 2, Room 599
Hosted By: Professor Marilyn Walker, Dept. of Computer Science

This lecture is free and open to the public, but visitors should purchase a parking pass from the visitor kiosk at the main entrance. There they can also provide a map showing the best parking for Engineering 2.

Richard Evans

Richard Evans, Electronic Arts

Date: Friday, December 4th
Time: 11:00am – 12:30pm
Location: Engineering 2 – 180 (Simularium)
Hosted By: Professor Marilyn Walker, Dept. of Computer Science

“People Simulations”

Richard Evans is the Senior AI Engineer for The Sims 3 at EA/Maxis, and has previously won awards for his role in developing the AI for Black & White.

In this talk, he will demo three examples of people simulations: Sims 3, Sim Philosophers (a simulation of philosophical debate), and Sim Diary (a model of text generation based on personality traits). He will focus on what these simulations have in common: a model of social understanding combined with a model of individual personality.

On Monday, October 12th, UCSC’s Expressive Intelligence Studio will be hosting a symposium on Procedural Content Generation. Please join us to see interesting talks by speakers Julian Togelius (ITU Copenhagen), Mark Riedl (Georgia Tech), and Kate Compton (EA/Maxis). There will also be a panel on “The Future of Procedural Content Generation”, moderated by Michael Mateas (UCSC), and a number of demos by students in EIS. All events will occur on the UC Santa Cruz campus. We hope you will be able to come!

Further information on talks and scheduling information is after the cut.