Computational Intelligence for Games Network Meeting

This week I attended an AI/Games network meeting in Imperial College London. It proved a very useful and interesting meeting and there was a very strong representation from industry. I think there will be a lot scope for building connections and collaborating with both academics and the games industry through this. The website will appear here: www.aigamesnetwork.org

Interesting things that came out of the meeting from our students (and perhaps staff) point of view is that there will be money available to fund visits to games companies (up to 30 visits over 3 years). A summer school is also planned - likely to occur January 2008 - which is an excellent idea.

Initially they have planned 12 network events, one major one and three focused on the 3 specialist areas:

• AI for NPCs (Simon Lucas)
  
• AI for Avatars (Peter Cowling)
  
• AI for Game Design (Simon Colton)

There was discussion about the overlap of the research areas and certainly from our research group point of view we can see that our projects often overlap in these areas.

The next event is the kick-off event on the 12th of Dec 2007 in the Dana Centre.