Location

E14-633

Description

User-generated content is everywhere: photos, videos, news, blogs, art, music, and every other type of digital media on the Social Web. Games are no exception. From strategy games to immersive virtual worlds, game players are increasingly engaged in creating and sharing nearly all aspects of the gaming experience: maps, quests, artifacts, avatars, clothing, even games themselves. Yet, there is one aspect of computer games that is not created and shared by game players: the AI. Building sophisticated personalities, behaviors, and strategies requires expertise in both AI and programming, and remains outside the purview of the end user.
To understand why Game AI is hard, we need to understand how it works. AI can take digital entertainment beyond scripted interactions into the arena of truly interactive systems that are responsive, adaptive, and intelligent. Ram will discuss examples of AI techniques for character-level AI (e.g., in embedded NPCs) and game-level AI (e.g., in the drama manager). These types of AI enhance the player experience in different ways. The techniques are complicated and are usually implemented by expert game designers.
Ram will argue that User-Generated AI is the next big frontier in the rapidly growing social gaming area. From Sims to Risk to World of Warcraft, end users want to create, modify, and share not only the appearance but the "minds" of their characters. Ram will present his recent research on intelligent technologies to assist game AI authors, and show the first Web 2.0 application that allows average users to create AIs and challenge their friends to play them—without programming. He will conclude with some thoughts about the future of AI-based interactive digital entertainment.

Biographies

Dr. Ashwin Ram is an associate professor and director of the Cognitive Computing Lab in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, an associate professor of cognitive science, and an adjunct professor in psychology at Georgia Tech and in MathCS at Emory University. He received his PhD from Yale University in 1989, his MS from University of Illinois in 1984, and his BTech from IIT Delhi in 1982. He has published two books and over 100 scientific articles in international forums. He is a founder of Enkia Corporation, which develops AI software for social media applications; Inquus Corporation, which is building an online social learning network called OpenStudy; and Cobot Health Corporation, which is developing conversational agents for health-care information access.