Greg Ashe (Director of Business Intelligence, Blizzard Entertainment)
Title: Data Mining and Machine Learning Applications in MMOs
Data mining and machine learning are becoming critical tools in the game industry. This talk will cover a variety of techniques used to help developers at Blizzard Entertainment understand how people are playing games. In addition, there will also be a review of new and interesting techniques being used by fans and other game companies to understand and improve games. This is intended to provide a broad overview of the application of data mining in PC games today read more.
Nathan Sturtevant (University of Denver, USA)
Title: Building a Modern Pathfinding Engine
Pathfinding is a key component in many video games, and is a popular topic for ongoing research, although very few researchers have the opportunity to deploy their work into commercial titles. This talk will begin by looking at pathfinding architectures and describing our experience going from a research project to a commercially deployed pathfinding engine that is shipping in BioWare’s series of Dragon Age games. In looking at the actual constraints in a shipping game, we see that there are a number common misunderstandings in common characterizations of pathfinding in games. These build to current research challenges in the field, and topics of ongoing research (read more).
Jong-Hwan Kim (KAIST, FIRA President, IROC President)
Title: Intelligence Technology for Cyber-Physical Robot System-based Games
Human beings will be living in a ubiquitous world in which all IT devices are fully networked so that they can offer us desired services at any place and anytime. This shift has hastened the ubiquitous revolution, which has further manifested itself in the new multidisciplinary research area, ubiquitous robotics. It initiates the third generation of robotics following the first generation of the industrial robot and the second generation of the personal robot. A fairy tale introduced Genie, which upon springing from a lamp served Aladdin. The ubiquitous era brings us to the threshold of the realization of this dream, through ubiquitous robotics (read more).
