AI and Games: Playing & Designing Games through Bio-Inspired AI

The Institute of Digital Games is thrilled to have Dr.Sebastian Risi Associate Professor – IT University of Copenhagen and Co-founder - Modl.ai, speaking as part of our Game Seminar Series. He will present some of their work on creating agents that can learn to play games through bio-inspired methods such as neural networks and evolutionary algorithms.

This May 17th we have a double bill of Artificial Intelligence in videogames starting from 16h00 with Creative artificial evolution through quality diversity algorithms by Dr Jean Baptiste Mouret.

The Future of AI in Video Games: Innovation inspired by biology

Many recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) would potentially not have been possible without the help of games. Especially video games with their complex worlds and large action spaces offer unique testbeds for advanced AI methods. Breakthroughs that have first been invented to beat the best human players in games such as Go or Poker are now being applied in many different domains such as healthcare or improving the efficiency of power grids. In this talk I will present some of our work on creating agents that can learn to play games through bio-inspired methods such as neural networks and evolutionary algorithms. Additionally, I will show that these algorithms do not only allow agents to play games but also enable creating entirely new types of games and games that continually adapt to the player.

At the Heart of the Evolution of AI in Videogames: About Dr. Sebastian Risi

Sebastian Risi is an Associate Professor at the IT University of Copenhagen where he is part of the Center for Computer Games Research and the Robotics, Evolution and Art Lab (REAL). His interests include computational intelligence in games, neuroevolution, deep learning, evolutionary robotics and human computation. Risi completed his PhD in computer science from the University of Central Florida. He has won several best paper awards at GECCO, EvoMusArt, IJCNN, and the Continual Learning Workshop at NIPS for his work on adaptive systems, and the HyperNEAT algorithm for evolving complex artificial neural networks. Additionally, he received the Distinguished Young Investigator in Artificial Life 2018 award and a Google Faculty Research award in 2019. Recently he co-founded modl.ai, a company that develops AIs that decide and respond like humans in a wide range of specific situations.

Stay up to date with Artificial Intelligence in Gaming Research Papers

The Game Seminar Series (GSS) are special academically oriented lectures that are held approximately once a month at the Institute of Digital Games. They are open to the public, but targeted to give University of Malta students supplementary information and update them on current research in the field. Research and education doesn't happen in silos, especially not in the multi-disciplinary field of game design. The Seminars bring together academics, practitioners and enthusiasts with a common love for games of any type: digital, analog, urban, free-form, and can range from the highly technological to the extremely philosophical. There is sure to be something to interest you. If you'd like to be kept up to date on our GSS and other events we invite you to subscribe to our Newsletter. Our Newsletter will also keep you up to date on the research papers published by the faculty (and students) of the Institute of Digital Games/