Welcome to the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG 2011) in Seoul, Korea. This is the seventh in a series of meetings bringing together researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to discuss recent advances and to explore future directions in computational intelligence and games. Games have proven to be an ideal domain for the study of computational intelligence as not only are they fun to play and interesting to observe, but they provide competitive and dynamic environments that model many real-world problems.

CIG 2011 features four keynote addresses and four tutorials from prominent experts, 46 full papers accepted for oral presentation, and four competitions. Keynote speakers include Greg Ashe from Blizzard Entertainment, Nathan Sturtevant from University of Denver, and Jong-Hwan Kim from KAIST. Four tutorials are provided at the first day of the conference: Bob Reynolds from Wayne State University, Daniel Ashlock from Univ. of Guelph, Georgios Yannakakis and Julian Togelius from IT University of Copenhagen, and Mike Preuss from Dortmund University.

In total, we received 75 papers from 27 countries that have been peer reviewed by at least three domain experts, resulting in 46 papers accepted (acceptance rate: 61.3%) for presentation and publication in the proceedings (42 regular papers and 4 competition papers). There were 95 reviewers who thoroughly vetted each paper. Moreover, we have four exciting competitions including the 2K-BotPrize competition, an interactive Turing test realized through Unreal Tournament, the StarCraft RTS competition, the simulated car racing championship, and the Ms Pac-Man competition.

I would like to thank all the people who made this conference possible. First of all I would like to thank our fellow organizers in the organizing committee: program chairs Simon Lucas and Philip Hingston; competitions chair Julian Togelius; proceedings chair Mike Preuss; publicity chair Clare Bates Congdon; special sessions and tutorials chair Georgios Yannakakis; and the local chairs Kyung-Joong Kim, Kyu-Baek Hwang and Eun-Youn Kim. They shared their wisdom and experience of running this conference before, and their tireless efforts made this conference possible.

I also want to thank our sponsors, first and foremost our main sponsor the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, but also NCsoft, Global Education Center for Engineers, National Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Seoul MetroPolitan Government, and the BK21 Project Research Group, Dept. of Computer Science, Yonsei University. Further, we would like to thank our keynote and tutorial speakers, who generously gave their time to come here and share their knowledge.

Last but certainly not least we would like to thank the people that really make this conference possible: you! All you delegates who worked hard to do the research that is presented at this conference, that chose to submit your papers here, and came all the way to Seoul to spend four days together talking about computational intelligence and games. I also want to acknowledge the helpful oversight of Gary Fogel, VP of CIS Conferences, and the support of Gary Yen, President of the IEEE CIS.

We hope that you enjoy the conference and your stay in Seoul.

Sung-Bae Cho

IEEE CIG 2011 General Chair