Ruck Thawonmas is a professor in College of Information Science and Engineering at Ritsumeikan University in Japan. His research interests include artificial intelligence, computational intelligence, and their applications to games for health promotion and live streaming. He is currently an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Games—formerly Computational Intelligence and AI in Games—(04/2014—present) as well as Games for Health Journal (07/2014—present). His experience in organizing both future and past academic events includes Student Activities Co-Chair at the 2020 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2020), Program Co-Chair at the 7th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications (IEEE SeGAH 2019), Workshop Co-Chair at the 12th International Conference on E-learning and Games (Edutainment 2018), Competition Chair at the 2017 IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2017) Conference, and Competition Co-Chair at the 2014 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2014).
Kyung-Joong Kim is an associate professor in School of Integrated Technology at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea. His research interests include machine learning, computational intelligence, and their applications to games. He is a chair of Real-time strategy games task force in game technical committee of IEEE CIS society. He has co-organized annual IEEE CIG StarCraft AI Competitions since 2014 and organized Game Data Mining Competition in 2017. He also supported The 18th Asia Pacific Symposium on Intelligent and Evolutionary Systems 2013 as a Program Co-Chair. In IEEE CIG 2011, he was a local arrangement chair.
Fabio Zambetta is an Associate Professor with the School of Science at RMIT University in Melbourne (Australia), in the Discipline of Computer Science & Software Engineering. He is the Coordinator for the Games & Graphics Programming degree at RMIT, where he teaches games programming and mixed reality subjects. His research interests focus on AI in Games, Interactive Narrative and Machine Learning in games and robotics. He is an active researcher in Computer Graphics, Mixed Reality and Natural User Interfaces. Recent work has entailed collaboration with industry partners such as Microsoft, Village Roadshow's Digital and Theme Park divisions, ACER (Australian Council for Education Research) and ANZ.
Kokolo Ikeda is an associate professor in School of Information Science at Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. His research interests include machine learning, tree search, genetic algorithm and their applications to games, especially content generation and human-like computer players as teammates or coaches. His experience in organizing academic events includes program co-chair in ASEAN Workshop on Information Science and Technology (2018), competition co-chair in Game AI Tournaments UEC-GAT (2016-2018), program co-chair in Game Programming Workshop (2014-2015) and general chair in Emergent System Symposium (2011).
Fotis Liarokapis is currently a Senior Researcher with the Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus. He received the D.Phil. degree from the University of Sussex, U.K., and has worked as a Research Fellow with City University, London, U.K., Coventry University, U.K., and most recently at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, where he was an Associate Professor and Director of the HCI Lab. His research interests include virtual reality, augmented reality, brain computer interfaces, and serious games. He is a Member of IEEE.
Jialin Liu is 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 created in August 2017. She received her Ph.D. Degree in Computer Science from the Inria Saclay and the Université Paris-Saclay (France) in December 2015 and a Master degree in Bioinformatics and Biostatistics from the École Polytechnique and the Université Paris-Sud (France) in 2013. Her research interests include Meta-heuristics, Noisy Optimisation, AI and Games. She is the Chair of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) Student Games-Based Competitions Sub-Committee and the Vice-Chair of the IEEE CIS Games Technical Committee and Webinars Sub-Committee. She serves in the IEEE CIS Women in Computational Intelligence Sub-Committee, Student Activities Sub-Committee, and Young Professionals Sub-Committee. She also serves as Program Co-Chair at IEEE CIG2018, as Competition Chair at FDG2018 and IEEE CEC2019.
Youichiro Miyake has been involved in the development of video game titles while researching game AI technologies as the lead AI researcher at Square Enix. He has developed and designed AI for numerous game titles. He has given many lectures in the universities and game developer conferences and has published academic papers on game AI and procedural techniques for digital games. He is the chair of the SIG-AI in International Game Developers Association Japan Chapter, and is also the board of Digital Game Research Association Japan and the Society of Art and Science.
Foaad Khosmood is an Associate Professor of Computer Science, and the Forbes Professor of Computer Engineering at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly). Foaad received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011. His research interests include Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence, and Interactive Entertainment. Foaad co-founded Global Game Jam in 2008. He is a former board member, CTO and president of Global Game Jam, Inc. where he helps to organize the world's largest game creation activity. He also co-founded the International Conference on Game Jams (ICGJ) in 2016 as the only academic conference dedicated to game jams and hackathons. Foaad has presented multiple times at Game Developers Conference and served on numerous program committees of academic conferences including: FDG, AIIDE, ICGJ, Digital Humanities and iLRN. He is general chair of FDG 2019.
África founded Yokozuna Data, an AI company headquartered in Tokyo that built a pioneer machine learning platform to predict videogame player behavior. África holds a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Reading, and MSc's in String Theory and Theoretical Physics from CERN and the Autonomous University of Madrid. África has been Marie Curie EU research fellow at CERN and scientist at RIKEN, Japan (using K computer) and the German Weather Service (working in satellite data assimilation). She is co-author of multiple peer-reviewed articles and regular invited speaker in international conferences. África has solid industry experience at SPSS Inc., IBM and Silicon Studio. Her work has been featured in media such as Bloomberg, Quartz, Nikkei, El País, SINC, The Economic Times and The Japan Times.
Hyunsoo Park is a Game AI researcher and developer of Game AI team in NCSOFT. He holds a PhD and MSc in Computer Engineering from the Sejong University (South Korea). His research interests include Game AI, Reinforcement Learning, and Evolutionary Algorithm.
Florian Richoux is an associate professor at the Université de Nantes in France. His research is mainly focused on Game AI problems, in particular about solving decision-making problems in real-time strategy games. He is member of the editorial board of the Springer Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games since 2014, as well as founder and head of the “Artificial Intelligence in Games” group within the CNRS French National Research Group in Artificial Intelligence since 2016. He co-organized the "Game AI" special track of the International Conference on Industrial, Engineering, Other Applications of Applied Intelligent Systems (IEA/AIE) in 2017, the “Large Scale Parallelism in Search” special session at the Learning and Intelligent OptimizatioN Conference (LION) in 2012 and 2013, and co-organized the “Parallel Methods for Constraint Solving” workshop associated to the International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP) in 2011.
Diego Perez-Liebana is a Lecturer in Computer Games and Artificial Intelligence at Queen Mary University of London (UK). He previously achieved a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Essex (2015). His research focuses on Reinforcement Learning and Evolutionary Computation in Game AI. He is author of more than 60 papers at main conferences and journals, including IEEE CIG, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and IEEE Transactions on CI and AI in Games. He has organised several international competitions on Game AI for IEEE CIG conferences, such as the PTSP and the GVGAI Competition. He served as competitions chair at IEEE CEEC 2015, 2016, track chair at nucl.ai 2015 and 2016, IEEE CIG 2016 and 2018, and he’s member of the CIS Competitions Sub-Committee. He will be acting as General Co-Chair at the first IEEE Conference on Games (CoG) 2019.
Ryosuke Yamanishi graduated and received Ph.D. of Engineering from Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan in 2012. Since 2012 he has joined college of information science and engineering, Ritsumeikan university as a research associate (2012-2014), an assistant professor (2014-2018) and a lecturer/associate professor (2018-present). During this period, he also joined the department of computer science, UBC, Canada as a visiting assistant professor. His interest includes multimedia processing such as computational linguistics, computer vision, music informatics and affective computing. Especially for computing comics information retrieval, he has organized a research community in Japan since 2013. He has been one of the chairs of an invited session at International Conference on Knowledge-Based and Intelligent Information & Engineering Systems during 2013 through 2018 and has organized invited session at The Asian Conference on Information Systems 2016 and 2017. Also, he served a local chair at EAI MobiCase 2018.
Kingkarn Sookhanaphibarn is an assistant professor in School of Information Technology and Innovation at Bangkok University in Thailand. Her research interests include applications and tools of multimedia technology as well as gamification in cybersecurity, educations, and health promotion. Her experience in organizing both future and past academic events includes general co-chair in International Conference on Consumer Electronics Aisa 2018 (ICCE-Asia 2018), international coordinator in Global Conference on Consumer Electronics (GCCE2018), organized session chair in GCCE from 2016 to 2018.
Hisashi Handa is an associate professor at Kindai University. He received his Ph.D degree (Informatics) from Kyoto University in 2001. From 2004 to 2005, he was a visiting research fellow of Centre of Excellence on Computational Intelligence and its Application (CERCIA) at the University of Birmingham, U.K. From 2006 to 2011, he has been an honorary research fellow of CERCIA, the University of Birmingham. He received the ACM GECCO 2009 Best Paper Award and the 2009 JSAI Incentive Award. He was 2014 IEEE CEC Technical Co-Chair, 2015 IEEE CEC Workshop Chair, 2017 SEAL Publicity Chair, 2018 ACM GECCO Local Chair, and so on.
Tomohiro Harada is an assistant professor in Faculty of System Design at Tokyo Metropolitan University in Japan. His research interests include computational intelligence, artificial intelligence, and health promotion. He is currently an editorial board member of Journal of Information Processing Society of Japan (June 2017 - present). His experience in organizing both future and past academic events include Local Arrangement Chair at ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference 2018 (GECCO 2018), Program Committee at Joint 10th International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems and 19th International Symposium on Advanced Intelligent Systems in conjunction with Intelligent Systems Workshop 2018 (SCIS-ISIS 2018), and Technical Program Committee at IEEE Global Conference on Consumer Electronics (GCCE) from 2016 to 2019.
Masayuki Otani is a lecturer in the Department of Informatics, at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, Kindai University. He has been working on the area of multi-agent systems for the internet of things and intercultural collaboration. Otani received a PhD in engineering from the University of Electro-Communications. Contact him at otani@info.kindai.ac.jp.
Dr. Kohei Matsumura is a Lecturer/Associate Professor in College of Computer Science and Engineering at Ritsumeikan University. He received his Ph.D. in Knowledge Science from Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 2010. His broad research interests include human-computer interaction, embodied cognitive science, urban informatics and novel HCI techniques.
Takeshi Ito is an assistant professor in the University of Electro-Communications in Japan. His major research area is cognitive science on human thought and expertise. He is currently Chair for Cognitive Science and Entertainment Research Station (06/2006--present) and a member for Artificial Intelligence eXploration Research Center (2016--present), and Steering Committee for Japanese Cognitive Science Society (2017--present). His experience in organizing past academic events in Program Chair at Workshop on Curling Informatics 2018 (2018) and at Game Programming Workshop (2002-2007), a Chairperson at Game Information Science Research Group in Information Processing Society of Japan (2013-2017).
Yun-Gyung Cheong is an Assistant Professor at Sungkyunkwan University, Korea. Her research interests lie in artificial intelligence with emphasis on its use in discourse planning for narrative, games, and user interfaces. She is working on interactive storytelling techniques on various platforms including 3D animation, VR, and games. Yun-Gyung is interested in computational models of stories and discourse such as story summarization, suspenseful story generation, and focalization. Her work also covers text mining and natural language processing (NLP). Yun-Gyung Cheong received the B.S. degree in 1996 and the M.S. degree in 1998 in information engineering from Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU). In 2007, she received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA. Before joining SKKU, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen (2010-2014) and a researcher at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (2007-2010).
Gillian Smith is an Assistant Professor in the Interactive Media and Game Development Program and Department of Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, USA. Her research interests include procedural content generation, computational creativity, computational craft, and computer science education. She is current Program Chair for AIIDE 2018, an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Games, and serves on the board of the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games. Her prior conference organization experience includes serving as co-chair of the Doctoral Consortium at AIIDE in 2017, and co-chairing the {Craft|Game} Play workshops (FDG 2015, HASTAC 2017, Different Games 2018).
Pujana Paliyawan is a senior researcher at Research Organization of Science and Technology, Ritsumeikan University. He holds a PhD in Information Science and Engineering from the Ritsumeikan University. His research interests include AI, HCI, and health monitoring systems.
Yudai Tsujino is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University. His research interests include procedural content generation and difficulty adjustment, especially with rhythm-based video games. Besides research, he is also a famous rhythm-based video game player participating in some official tournaments.