Science in the City (EU corner) 2017

The Institute of Digital Games presented some of the projects and research they are currently working on at Science in the City, Malta’s science and arts festival.
At the AutoGameDesign stand visitors could experiment with some of the games the students had been using for their Artificial Intelligence research, including a weapon that adapts to the skills of the users to ensure more balanced gameplay, prediction models for first-person shooter weapons, procedurally generated coral, and many more. The visitors also had the opportunity to speak to the researchers themselves and ask questions about their work. IDG Lecturers Dr Antonios Liapis and Georgios Yannakakis presented their research explaining the basics of Artificial Intelligence and Procedural Content Generation. PhD students and researchers Daniele Gravina and Daniel Karavolos were also on hand to answer the public’s questions.

Read more at LINK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AutoGameDesign presence at the FDG 2017 conference

IDG member Daniel Karavolos attended the Foundations of Digital Games at Cape Cod in August 2017 to present his latest research at the Institute of Digital Games. His presentation took place at the Procedural Content Generation workshop, and highlighted ways in which game balance could be predicted from a visual representation of a game level combined with weapon parameters. The paper with the underlying details is “Learning the Patterns of Balance in a Multi-Player Shooter Game” which focuses on first person shooter games and especially on team-based deathplay matches: the input to the computational model is the image of the game level, highlighting areas of high cover and low cover (chest-high walls), and the parameters of the weapon used by each team (every member of the team always uses one weapon for simplicity). The most effective computational model is a convolutional neural network, taking advantage of the recent deep learning advances to achieve accuracy far higher than that of simpler networks or random guessing. You can find the paper, co-authored by Antonios Liapis and Georgios N. Yannakakis, here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AutoGameDesign presence at the GECCO 2017 conference

IDG members Daniele Gravina and Antonios Liapis attended the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference in Berlin, presenting original work from the Institute of Digital Games on evolutionary divergent search. Daniele Gravina presented work co-authored with Antonios Liapis and Georgios N. Yannakakis titled “Coupling Novelty and Surprise for Evolutionary Divergence” which combines two divergent search algorithms (one trying to find novel solutions and one trying to find surprising solutions) and tests their performance in a maze navigation task. Daniele also presented a poster on evolving surprising soft robot morphologies, summarized in “Exploring Divergence in Soft Robot Evolution”. You can find the papers, co-authored by Antonios Liapis and Georgios N. Yannakakis, here and here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Science in the City (EU corner) 2016

On Friday, 30th of September 2016, Valletta wore its (metaphorical) lab coat and welcomed another Science in the City event. The Institute of Digital Games could not be absent from the event, and four members of the tech-oriented IDG staff were present at the city gates and the EU corner, showcasing the latest research funded by the FP7 Marie Curie CIG project AutoGameDesign.
Read more at LINK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AutoGameDesign presence at the IEEE CIG 2016 conference

The Institute of Digital Games had an impressive presence at the IEEE Computational Intelligence and Games Conference that took place in beautiful Santorini. The conference, attended by over 100 international experts in the field of artificial intelligence and games, included seven members of the IDG presenting a variety of papers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Science in the City (EU corner) 2015

Science in the City is a “science and arts festival with entertainment, art installations, talks, music, theatre, comedy, science cafes, interactive exhibits, live experiments and more”, held in Malta.
To celebrate 10 years of European Researchers’ Night, a special event, called EU corner, has focused on double Nobel winner Marie Sklodowska-Curie. Here people were able to meet the researchers behind the Marie Curie EU funded project named AutoGameDesign, hear about the science behind a computational game designer and try out their games.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Science in the City 2014

Science in the City is a science and arts festival held in Malta, as part of the European Researchers’ Night.
Here the researchers of the Marie Curie EU funded project AutoGameDesign have shown the results of their research and the games developed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AutoGameDesign presence at the AIIDE 2015 conference

IDG student work finds its way into academic conferences: the M.Sc. thesis work of William Cachia on shooter game level generation was presented in the Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference in Santa Cruz on November 17, 2015. You can find the paper, co-authored by Antonios Liapis and Georgios N. Yannakakis, here: PDF
 

 

 

Computational Game Creativity @ ICCC 2014

This article has been published, without accompanying pictures, at the International Conference on Computational Creativity 2014. The original publication can be found here and its bibtex entry here. The talk was recorded and can be watched here:

This project has received funding from 
the European Union's Seventh Framework 
for research, technological development
and demonstration under grant agreement 
no:630665.