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< Back iGGi 2021 CON The iGGi 2021 Conference concluded last week and we look back on two days that were fully packed with Talks Keynotes Panels Workshops the customary iGGi Buzz Talks knowledge exchange + networking and not to forget, a much-needed dose of socialising + fun If you've missed some or (hopefully not) all of it - we've compiled selected recordings, so that you can catch up via YouTube at your own leisure. A MASSIVE THANK YOU to the team of conference organisers: Nick Ballou , Timea Farkas , Dan Gomme , Joe Hesketh , Bobby Khaleque , Charlie Ringer , Michael Saiger , Evelyn Tan , Marko Tot , Kyle Worrall - this could not have happened without your dedication, effort, and creative input!This year's IGGI 2021 CON took place online on gather.town : with customisable avatars and an engaging conference map it felt like the next best option to an in-person event. Having said that, we can't wait to run IGGI 2022 as a face-to-face experience again, and we are very much hoping to see you there!! Previous 17 Sept 2021 Next

< Back iGGi Becomes WIG Education Ambassador iGGi is proud to officially announce that we are now Women in Games (WIG) Education Ambassadors as of last week. We at iGGi feel strongly that the future in games industry and research must include a more level playing field for all the groups which currently lack visibility and/or voice. We want to do our part in creating societal change in that respect. Here's a link to the article in the WIG newsletter featuring our senior academic spokesperson Raluca Gaina. >> iGGi joins Women in Games as Education Ambassador . We are very happy that Raluca has accepted this new role: as she is both, an iGGi Alumna and an iGGi Supervisor/Staff, she is particularly suited to representing women, not only within iGGi but also in games research as a whole. Included in the iGGi WIG team will be any interested PGRs who we will introduce in one of the forthcoming iGGi News articles, so, watch this space! If you as an iGGi PGR are interested in joining in, please let iGGi Admin know. (Note: You don’t have to identify as female to become a WIG Ambassador.) Here’s also a general link to this month’s WIG July Newsletter And finally, a big THANKS goes to the WIG Team who have been amazingly supportive already. We look forward to many years of collaboration ahead of us! Previous 20 Jul 2023 Next

iGGi PhD Projects - listing iGGi PhD Projects 2023 Game AI This page displays the supervisor-proposed PhD projects on offer under the above stated theme: If you are interested in any of the projects listed and would like further details and/or to discuss, please email the project supervisor. Please note that you can also frame your own project independently granted that you have secured a supervisor's support. For a list of available supervisors please see the accepting students section of our website. While iGGi has checked that the project descriptions listed below are within iGGi's scope , we wish to highlight that you are still responsible for ensuring that your proposal, too, is in line with this scope, and we would further like to point out that supervisor-framed projects are not prioritised in the application selection process: they are judged by the same criteria as applicant-framed proposals. For guidance to make sure that the proposal you submit (regardless of whether it has been supervisor-framed or created entirely by you) sits within iGGi's scope please refer to this link: https://iggi.org.uk/iggi-scope Navigate to other Themes on offer: Game AI Design & Development Player Research Game Audio Game Data Immersive Technology Creative Computing E-Sports Applied Games Back to ALL Projects Game AI Automatic Evaluation of Tabletop Games This project proposal aims to research and develop methods to accurately evaluate the impact of modern Tabletop Games components in different aspects of gameplay. Price Game AI Duration Diego Pérez-Liébana Read More Game AI Principled and Scalable Exploration Techniques for Reinforcement Learning In this project, you will develop principled and scalable exploration techniques based on reducing model uncertainty. Price Game AI Duration Paulo Rauber Read More Game AI Evolving Perception for Game Agents This project will investigate game agents in open world games which evolve their senses and world representation alongside learning what actions to take in each state. We will evolve game agents with highly alien behaviours which nevertheless have high fitness in the open world environment, while investigating important scientific questions about how senses and world representations evolved in humans. Price Game AI Duration Alex Wade, Peter Cowling Read More Load More

< Back Joint Writing Retreat - November 2023 Another fantastic Joint Writing Retreat was had with our colleagues at MAT , CDE and AIM this week at the beautiful High Leigh. Feedback from the event, was, as always really positive with: 100% of respondents saying the retreat was useful and beneficial to their research/progress 96% saying they would recommend it to others 95% saying they produced more content than expected With comments about the primary benefit of the retreat being: Scheduled writing time and not having to worry about preparing food, chores etc Refreshing and networking with people in a similar but different sphere made me reframe I feel good writing in a big group. And I have good mood in here Very focused working time and environment. More productive than the office. Very quiet and focused. Not having to think about what food to buy and to prepare and to cook takes the mental load off to just focus on writing. It's surprising how much fretting about food preparation for the week takes out of your day. Here is the word cloud created from the Mentimeter “poll of 3 words” to describe the retreat: Previous 24 Nov 2023 Next

iGGi PhD Projects - listing iGGi PhD Projects 2023 Game Audio This page displays the supervisor-proposed PhD projects on offer under the above stated theme: If you are interested in any of the projects listed and would like further details and/or to discuss, please email the project supervisor. Please note that you can also frame your own project independently granted that you have secured a supervisor's support. For a list of available supervisors please see the accepting students section of our website. While iGGi has checked that the project descriptions listed below are within iGGi's scope , we wish to highlight that you are still responsible for ensuring that your proposal, too, is in line with this scope, and we would further like to point out that supervisor-framed projects are not prioritised in the application selection process: they are judged by the same criteria as applicant-framed proposals. For guidance to make sure that the proposal you submit (regardless of whether it has been supervisor-framed or created entirely by you) sits within iGGi's scope please refer to this link: https://iggi.org.uk/iggi-scope Navigate to other Themes on offer: Game AI Design & Development Player Research Game Audio Game Data Immersive Technology Creative Computing E-Sports Applied Games Back to ALL Projects Game Audio Machine Learning of Procedural Audio This work will investigate whether procedural audio can fully replace the use of pre-recorded sound effects. Price Game Audio Duration Joshua Reiss & Nemesindo Read More Load More

< Back iGGi Game Jam 2023 The iGGi Game Jam has kicked off on 11 January 2023 and this year’s theme was TRANSFERENCE - check out what the jammers came up with! Here’s a quick summary of the submitted games (in no particular order): Prison of the Endless by James Goodman, Prasad Sandbhor, George Long Agony Haunt by Callum Deery, Sahar Mirhadi, Amy Smith, Florence Smith Nicholls, Sunny Thaicharoen Pseudo Judo by Toby Best, Bobby Khaleque, Dimitris Menexopoulos, Oliver Withington Trip to the Moon by Charline Foch, FrancescaFoffano, Carlos Gonzalez Diaz Outbalance by Yu-Jhen Hsu, Peyman Hosseini, Nirit Binyamini Ben-Meir, Dominik Jeurissen Move The Groove by Dan Cooke, Nathan John-McDougall Pitch ‘it by Michael Saiger Nick Cage's Face Off 2 by Adrián Barahona-Ríos, Matt Whitby Mind Shift by Remo Sasso, Michelangelo Conserva, James Gardner *hacker voice* I’M IN. –– A Hacking Mechanic Supplement by Younès Rabii I know that person by Madeleine Frister, Maximilian Croissant Harlan by Luke Farrar, Tom Wells, Lauren Winter, Evgenii Kashin General audio support to various games was lent by Erin Robinson. And links to all of these games can of course be found via the iGGi GAMES page here or alternatively also via this page on itch: https://itch.io/jam/iggi23/entries There even was a Mini Contest on the last jam day!! Prizes went to the following teams and categories: Agony Haunt won MUCH WOW Nick Cage's Face Off 2 won BUT… WHY? Harlan won LESS IS MORE Outbalance won GIT GUD Pseudo Judo won IT’S A FEATURE Many Congrats to the winners! Yet, it needs to be said: With so many little game gems, it’s nigh impossible to pick favourites! The Game Jam wrapped on Friday afternoon - see twitter thread: Previous 13 Jan 2023 Next

< Back iGGi Con 2024 - It's A Wrap Now in its 11th iteration, the iGGi Con once again proved to be a full success. Each year, the iGGi Con showcases latest advancements in games research and offers a networking platform where games industry members and academics working in games and adjacent fields can connect. The iGGi Con 2024 was held at the University of York in the Law and Sociology Building of Campus East and spanned over two days. Totaling 11 talks, 3 keynotes, 2 panels, 3 workshops, 3 buzz talk sessions and 28 posters. It hosted l 160 attendees from industry and academia. The iGGi Expo ran in parallel during the afternoon of conference day 1 and afforded conference attendees the opportunity to chat 1:1 with participating iGGi industry partners: a big thank you to everyone who took part! We were also excited to welcome a number of iGGi Alumni who joined the event and who were able to share stories and anecdotes from their time with as well as after iGGi, and we loved the insights and tips they offered! And of course, we're back next year, again at the University of York , so, make sure you SAFE THE DATE >>> 10-11 September 2025 <<< The galleries below show impressions of the two days. iGGi Talks iGGi Keynotes iGGi Posters iGGi Panels More impressions Previous 13 Sept 2024 Next

< Back How does machine learning affect diversity in evolutionary search? Procedural content generation of video games levels has greatly benefited from machine learning. In such complex domains, generative models can provide representation spaces for evolutionary search. But how expressive are such learned models? How many different levels would they be able to produce? A new paper, co-authored by IGGI PhD researcher Sebastian Berns and Professor Simon Colton, looks at the limitations of generative models in the context of multi-solution optimisation. The work will be presented at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) and is nominated for a best paper award . The study shows that quality diversity (QD) search in the latent space of a variational auto-encoder yields a solution set of lower diversity than in a manually-defined genetic parameter space. The authors find that learned latent spaces are useful for the comparison of artefacts and recommend their use for distance and similarity estimation. However, whenever a parametric search space is obtainable, it should be preferred over a learned representation space as it produces a higher diversity of solutions. Alexander Hagg, Sebastian Berns, Alexander Asteroth, Simon Colton & Thomas Bäck. (2021). Expressivity of Parameterized and Data-driven Representations in Quality Diversity Search. In Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. Pre-print available on arXiv https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.04247Accompanying code repository available on Github https://github.com/alexander-hagg/ExpressivityGECCO2021 Previous 27 Jun 2021 Next

< Back IGGI on Industry Impact As the Easter Break is approaching fast, IGGI Year 1 students can report the successful conclusion of the last in a total of four modules: The Impact and Engagement Training. The course (usually held at Queen Mary University of London) was online this year, running over two weeks. The module encourages students to explore the potential impact of their research on the games industry in view of different aspects such as creativity, society, culture, economy, politics, etc. Students discuss feasibility and effectiveness of available engagement tools that can be utilised to create and maximise the envisaged impact. Rooted in the real-world, in true IGGI style, the training included talks by a wide range of invited guest speakers who brought their experience and expertise to the (virtual) table. On that note, a MASSIVE THANKS goes to AI Factory , Women in Games , BAME in Games , Sony , Game Republic , Fusebox Games , Player Research , UKIE , aiandgames.com , and Science Fiction author Matthew de Abaitua for their insightful talks and for representing the industry’s multifaceted perspective. A shoutout also to the IGGI academics and PhD students who contributed! Previous 1 Apr 2021 Next

< Back LAST EVER iGGi Cohort – Sep 2023 Start iGGi is proud to announce that we have now successfully recruited a total of 120 PhD researchers over its two funding runs (i.e., “IGGI 1” and “IGGI 2” which each granted funding for 5 years of new intake), resulting in a total of 10 cohorts of 12 new researchers on average per year. While this is sad news for those who were hoping to apply to the programme in future as there won’t be any further recruitment, we are excited about the high quality of work that iGGis on the programme have so far achieved and about what is still to come. Our last ever intake comprises a total of 16 new researchers who are about to start the programme officially at the beginning of this October (2023). We’ve seen teasers of their research projects during the “Year 1 Buzz” session of last week’s iGGi conference, and, diverse though they were in their topic areas, they all looked very promising. – We can’t wait to hear more of it!! If you are a new iGGi Year 1 and happen to read this: Here’s a warm welcome to you from the iGGi Community - to many years of shared work and fun! Previous 18 Sept 2023 Next

< Back 2021 iGGi Brochure Out now! The 2021 iGGi Brochure * lists profiles of all iGGi Researchers who actively participated in this year's iGGi Conference. Browse the linked pdf version (as well as the Students page on this site, of course) to find out more about individual iGGi PhD's current research. *Brochure design/layout by Timea Farkas Previous 8 Oct 2021 Next

< Back The AI and Games Conference IS BACK! It was the first event dedicated to game AI developers in Europe since 2017, and boy did the community embrace it. In the main organiser's (Tommy Thompson from AI and Games ) own words: "Nature abhors a vacuum and I'm the idiot big enough to try and fill it." - Tommy, you did achieve, and we thank you for that bold move from the bottom of our hearts! Big thanks also to all the sponsors, and specifically to our iGGi Industry Advisory Board Chair Duygu Ç acmak (Creative Assembly) who's a co-organiser. The one-day, double-track event took place on 08 November 2024 at Goldsmiths, University of London and featured international speakers from industry and academia who covered a broad spectrum of topics related to AI and Games in an informative and well-structured way. We're proud to say that we witnessed this launch with 13 iGGi PG Researchers and a whole bunch of iGGi Staff. We also spotted quite a few iGGi Alumni who had made it to the event independently. Moreover, Raluca Gaina and Diego Pérez-Liébana featured with a talk about their spin-off company " Tabletop R&D " >> If you've missed it, here's the Talk Recording We were really impressed about the level of organisation and attention to detail, and we're certainly hoping that the conference will be back again next year! >> Here's a link to all the the talks' recordings Previous 11 Nov 2024 Next