Georgios N. Yannakakis

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Georgios N. Yannakakis
Georgios N. Yannakakis.jpg
Georgios N. Yannakakis
Occupation(s)Director and Professor

Georgios N. Yannakakis is Director and Professor at the Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Games. [1] [2] He is one of the leading researchers within player affective modelling and adaptive content generation for games. [3] [4] He is considered one of the most accomplished experts at the intersection of games and AI. [5]

Contents

Career

Yannakakis received his Diploma in Production Engineering from the Technical University of Crete, Greece, and in 2006 his PhD from the Department of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK. He was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen from 2007 to 2012, and from 2012 he has been an Associate Professor and then a Full Professor at the University of Malta. [6]

Research

Yannakakis has pioneered the use of preference learning algorithms in combination with player questionnaires to create statistical models of player's experiences when playing computer games. [7]

Additionally, Yannakakis has made significant contributions to procedural content generation in games, in particular the Search-based Procedural Content Generation and Experience-driven Procedural Content Generation frameworks. In Search-based Procedural Content Generation, evolutionary algorithms are used to create content through search in content space. [8] In Experience-driven Procedural Content Generation, a model of player experience is used as an objective function to create game content that is adapted to the player's preference and/or behavior. [9]

Another area which Yannakakis has contributed to is computational creativity. In particular, he has co-invented the DeLeNoX algorithm for automatic transformational creativity through combining deep learning with novelty search, [10] and the surprise search algorithm, which is an algorithm related to novelty search but based on a model of the psychological notion of surprise. [11] Some of his research on computational creativity has also focused on how to create content across multiple facets of games. [12]

Yannakakis' research has attracted attention from Danish newspapers and TV. [13] It has also attracted attention from games press such as Kotaku. [14]

In 2018, Yannakakis (together with Julian Togelius) co-authored a textbook on artificial intelligence and games, simply called Artificial Intelligence and Games [15] [16] and published by Springer Nature. Together with Togelius, he also organized a summer school on the topics of the book. [17] He has also co-edited a book on Emotion in Games. [18]

Related Research Articles

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Neuroevolution, or neuro-evolution, is a form of artificial intelligence that uses evolutionary algorithms to generate artificial neural networks (ANN), parameters, and rules. It is most commonly applied in artificial life, general game playing and evolutionary robotics. The main benefit is that neuroevolution can be applied more widely than supervised learning algorithms, which require a syllabus of correct input-output pairs. In contrast, neuroevolution requires only a measure of a network's performance at a task. For example, the outcome of a game can be easily measured without providing labeled examples of desired strategies. Neuroevolution is commonly used as part of the reinforcement learning paradigm, and it can be contrasted with conventional deep learning techniques that use gradient descent on a neural network with a fixed topology.

Swarm intelligence (SI) is the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial. The concept is employed in work on artificial intelligence. The expression was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.

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In video games, artificial intelligence (AI) is used to generate responsive, adaptive or intelligent behaviors primarily in non-player characters (NPCs) similar to human-like intelligence. Artificial intelligence has been an integral part of video games since their inception in the 1950s. AI in video games is a distinct subfield and differs from academic AI. It serves to improve the game-player experience rather than machine learning or decision making. During the golden age of arcade video games the idea of AI opponents was largely popularized in the form of graduated difficulty levels, distinct movement patterns, and in-game events dependent on the player's input. Modern games often implement existing techniques such as pathfinding and decision trees to guide the actions of NPCs. AI is often used in mechanisms which are not immediately visible to the user, such as data mining and procedural-content generation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Procedural generation</span> Method in which data is created algorithmically as opposed to manually

In computing, procedural generation is a method of creating data algorithmically as opposed to manually, typically through a combination of human-generated assets and algorithms coupled with computer-generated randomness and processing power. In computer graphics, it is commonly used to create textures and 3D models. In video games, it is used to automatically create large amounts of content in a game. Depending on the implementation, advantages of procedural generation can include smaller file sizes, larger amounts of content, and randomness for less predictable gameplay. Procedural generation is a branch of media synthesis.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to artificial intelligence:

The Center for Computer Games Research is located at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark and was one of the first academic departments entirely dedicated to the scholarly study of digital gaming. Originally a part of the Department of Digital Aesthetics and Communication and spun off into its own independent unit in 2003, the Center was notable at the time for its sole specialization in gaming. It has historically been a multidisciplinary unit with faculty from fields ranging from literature to sociology to computer science. It has hosted a number of key conferences over the years including Other Players (2004), the 2005 iteration of the Digital Arts and Culture conference, and the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games in 2010.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computational creativity</span> Multidisciplinary endeavour

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zillions of Games</span> General game playing software

Zillions of Games is a commercial general game playing system developed by Jeff Mallett and Mark Lefler in 1998. The game rules are specified with S-expressions, Zillions rule language. It was designed to handle mostly abstract strategy board games or puzzles. After parsing the rules of the game, the system's artificial intelligence can automatically play one or more players. It treats puzzles as solitaire games and its AI can be used to solve them.

Dynamic game difficulty balancing (DGDB), also known as dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) or dynamic game balancing (DGB), is the process of automatically changing parameters, scenarios, and behaviors in a video game in real-time, based on the player's ability, in order to avoid making the player bored or frustrated. The goal of dynamic difficulty balancing is to keep the user interested from the beginning to the end, providing a good level of challenge.

<i>Galactic Arms Race</i> 2010 video game

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julian Togelius</span> Video game researcher

Julian Togelius is an associate professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering.

In computer science, Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) is a heuristic search algorithm for some kinds of decision processes, most notably those employed in software that plays board games. In that context MCTS is used to solve the game tree.

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Noor Shaker is a Syrian entrepreneur and computer scientist who co-founded the AI for drug discovery start-up Glamorous AI. Glamorous AI was acquired by the US-based company X-Chem in Nov 2021. Before Glamorous AI, Noor founded the drug discovery start-up GTN Ltd and served as CEO for more than two years. She stepped down as CEO in August 2019. The company entered liquidation in March 2020. In 2018, she received a CogX UK Rising Star Award from Prime Minister Theresa May for "AI technology that will transform drug discovery to treat chronic diseases".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Artificial intelligence art</span> Machine application of knowledge of human aesthetic expressions

Artificial intelligence art is any artwork created through the use of artificial intelligence.

In video games, various artificial intelligence techniques have been used in a variety of ways, ranging from non-player character (NPC) control to procedural content generation (PCG). Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence that focuses on using algorithms and statistical models to make machines act without specific programming. This is in sharp contrast to traditional methods of artificial intelligence such as search trees and expert systems.

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IEEE Transactions on Games is a quarterly journal of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society that publishes peer-reviewed articles covering scientific, technical, and engineering aspects of games. The editor-in-chief is Georgios N. Yannakakis.

References

  1. "Biography of Georgios N. Yannakakis at the CEBIT 2018 conference". CEBIT. Archived from the original on 2018-08-27.
  2. Editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Games
  3. Videnskab.dk Archived 2010-06-05 at the Wayback Machine (Danish Science News source)
  4. "Des jeux vidéo sur mesure", Le Monde, 12 December 2009]
  5. Reviews of the Artificial Intelligence and Games book
  6. http://yannakakis.net/ Georgios N. Yannakakis' homepage
  7. New Scientist, issue 2622, September 2007
  8. Julian Togelius, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Kenneth O. Stanley and Cameron Browne (2011): Search-based Procedural Content Generation: A Taxonomy and Survey. IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and AI in Games (TCIAIG), Volume 3 Issue 3, 172-186.
  9. Georgios N. Yannakakis and Julian Togelius (2016): Experience-driven Procedural Content Generation. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, Volume 2 Issue 3
  10. Antonios Liapis, Hector P. Martinez, Julian Togelius, Georgios N. Yannakakis: DeLeNoX "Transforming Exploratory Creativity with DeLeNoX," in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Creativity, 2013, pp. 56-63.
  11. Surprise search overview
  12. Antonios Liapis, Georgios N. Yannakakis, Julian Togelius: "Computational Game Creativity," in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Computational Creativity, 2014.
  13. ""Danskernes Akademi", DR (Danish public service broadcaster)". Archived from the original on 2016-03-09. Retrieved 2010-04-28.
  14. "Humans Create Program That Builds Its Own Super Mario Bros. Levels"
  15. Artificial Intelligence and Games book homepage
  16. Artificial Intelligence and Games publisher homepage
  17. Game AI Summer School
  18. Emotion in Games book