Ruck Thawonmas is a professor in College of Information Science and Engineering at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. His lab has won a number of prestigious game AI competitions such as the first AIBIRDS Level Generation Champion at the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (IEEE-CIG) 2016, the IEEE-CIG 2014 StarCraft AI Competition, and the AIIDE 2014 StarCraft AI Competition. He is an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Games as well as a general co-chair for IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2020, Osaka, Japan.
Santiago Ontañón
AI for playing games
Drexel University
Santiago Ontañón is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Drexel University. His main research interests are game AI, case-based reasoning and machine learning. He obtained his PhD form the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Spain, for his work on learning in multiagent systems. Before joining Drexel, he held postdoctoral positions at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA) in Barcelona, at the Georgia Institute of Technology (GeorgiaTech) in Atlanta, and at the University of Barcelona. He is currently a visiting researcher at Google.
Mike Cook
PCG, AI for Game Design
Queen Mary University of London
Mike Cook is an AI researcher, game designer and writer from the UK. He is currently a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow based at Queen Mary University of London, where he researches automated game design, procedural content generation and computational creativity. Mike is best known as the creator of ANGELINA, an automated game design system that was the first AI to enter a game jam, has released a Top 500 Android game, and had its work exhibited at the babycastles gallery in New York. He has collected all of the strawberries in Celeste. For more information, visit http://possibilityspace.org/
Simon Colton
PCG, AI for Game Design
Alessandro Canossa
Analytics & player modeling
Christoph Salge
Benchmarks & competitions
University of Hertfordshire
Christoph Salge is a Marie-Curie Global Fellow interested in artificial intelligence, games, intrinsic motivation and information theory. He just finished a two year visit to the NYU Game Innovation Lab, where he used different motivational models to create NPC behaviour and generate content for games. He is now back at the University of Hertfordshire’s Adaptive Systems Research Group. He is also one of the organizers of the GDMC AI Settlement Generation Challenge in Minecraft, served as proceedings chair for FDG 2018 and local chair for CIG 2017 and is an associative editor for Adaptive Behaviour.
Jialin Liu
Benchmarks & competitions
Southern University of Science and Technology
Jialin Liu is currently a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech, China). Before joining SUSTech, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL, UK) and one of the founding members of the Game AI research group of QMUL. Jialin holds a Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science from the Inria Saclay and the Université Paris-Saclay (France). Her research interests include AI and games, noisy optimisation, portfolio of algorithms and meta-heuristics. Jialin serves as Program Co-Chair of IEEE CIG2018, and Competition Chair of FDG2018, FDG2019 and IEEE CEC2019. She also serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Games.
Garry Greenwood
Game Theory & Multi-agent Systems
Justus Robertson
Narrative & Interactive Entertainment
Arnav Jhala
Narrative & Interactive Entertainment
Andy Nealen
Graphics & Animation
Karen Collins
Sound & music
Guenter Wallner
Game Interfaces & User Interaction
University of Applied Arts Vienna
Günter is Senior Scientist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Institute of Art & Technology and Assistant Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, Department of Industrial Design. His research interests lie at the intersection of games user research, data analytics, and information visualization. His work particularly centers on understanding player behavior in games and on researching methods to explore and communicate the collected data to derive actionable insights for game design and development. As part of this, he is working on data visualizations to support the analysis of increasingly large-scale player behavioral datasets.
Katerina Mania
Virtual & Augmented Reality
Technical University of Crete
Katerina Mania serves as an Associate Professor at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Greece after research positions at HP Labs, UK where she worked on Web3D and University of Sussex, UK where she served as an Assistant Professor in Multimedia Systems. She received her BSc in Mathematics from the University of Crete, Greece and her MSc and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bristol, UK. Her primary research interests integrate perception, vision and neuroscience to optimise computer graphics rendering and VR technologies with current focus on gaze-contingent displays. She has co-chaired technical programs and has participated in over 100 international conference program committees. She serves as one of the Associate Editors for Presence, Tele-operators and Virtual Environments (MIT Press) and ACM Transactions on Applied Perception.
Riccardo Berta
Serious Games Technology
University of Genoa
Riccardo Berta is Associate Professor of Electronics at the University of Genoa. His research activity is focused on the applications of Electronic Systems, in particular in the fields of Internet of Things (IoT) and Serious Gaming. He is with the University of Genoa Elios Lab research team since 1998. He is the author of 120+ scientific publications in journals, edited books, and conference proceedings. He is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Serious Games and founding member of the Serious Games Society (SGS). More info at https://about.me/riccardo.berta
Sara De Freitas
Serious Games Technology
Sara de Freitas is an educator and author. With over twenty years in higher education she has written over 200 conference and journal articles and seven books, including her latest book, Education in Computer Generated Environments published recently in paperback by Routledge, which outlines a future learning and compiles case studies from schools and universities, to show the impact of games design for improving learning. Previously Founder and Director of the Serious Games Institute in the UK, and holding senior executives positions up to Deputy Vice Chancellor in Australia and the UK, Sara is passionate about improving student engagement through innovative teaching and has extensive international networks having spoken in four continents.
Link to book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Education-Computer-Generated-Environments-Routledge/dp/1138478180/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Antonios Liapis is currently a Lecturer at the Institute of Digital Games (University of Malta). He does research at the crossroads of game design, artificial intelligence and computational creativity. More specifically, he explores the limits of computational input to the human-driven design process in computer-aided design tools. Beyond AI-assisted game design, his research pursuits revolve around procedural content generation, digital aesthetics, evolutionary computation, neuroevolution and constrained optimization. He has published over 70 international journal, conference and workshop papers, is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Games, and has served as co-organizer of 9 workshops (at AIIDE, ICCC, FDG, and CHI) and as the local chair of Computational Intelligence and Games conference (2016). Finally, he has served the International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art and Design (EvoMusArt) as Proceedings Chair (2017) and General Chair (2018-2019) and is the general chair of the Games and Learning Alliance conference (2019).