A.I. and Games: The Co-Revolution by Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis

This talk focuses on the wonderful and long-term relationship between games and AI and the impact such a relationship has had on our lives. Games have been a core driving force for the revolution of AI which, in turn, has reframed our culture, and reshaped our society at large. While games have been assisting AI since its birth it is only very recently that we experience a strong inverse relationship: Creative AI nowadays designs exciting games for us to play and for AI to advance further. While games are arguably one of the last frontiers for AI, AI is also the next great leap forward for games.

Speaker Information:

Georgios N. Yannakakis is a Professor and Director of the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta, a co-founder of modl.ai and an Associate Professor at the Technical University of Crete. He is a leading expert of the game artificial intelligence research field with core theoretical contributions in machine learning, evolutionary computation, affective computing and player modelling, computational creativity and procedural content generation. He has published more than 200 papers and his work has been cited broadly (nearly 10,000 citations; h-index 51). He has attracted funding from several EU (mainly FP7, H2020) and national research projects and received multiple awards for published work in top-tier journals and conferences. His work has been featured in New Scientist, Science Magazine, The Guardian, Le Monde and other venues.
He is regularly invited to give keynote talks an tutorials in the most recognised conferences in his areas of research activity and has organized a few of the most respected conferences in the areas of game AI and game research. He has been an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games and the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2009–2016). He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Games. He has given tutorials in IEEE CIG (in 2008, 2011 and 2014), ACII (2009), IEEE GIC (2009) conferences and at the recent DeepLearn Summer School (2017). More details on Georgios N. Yannakakis can be found at his web page: http://yannakakis.net/