The 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games: Report

I have just spent the last week at the 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computation Intelligence and Games in Milan (see last post).

It has been an excellent week both from a scientific point of view and from a networking point of view (I have even added a few new facebook friends as a result of the symposium).

There really is some fantastic work going on around the world. The plenaries and tutorials showed just some of this. The work being done by people such as Ken Stanley, Michael Mateas, Yngvi Björnsson, David Stern (Microsoft Research), Stefano Lecchi (Milestone) and James Vaccaro is very impressive and the products they produce have the commercial sector (some of which work in this area anyway) really taking notice.

Of course, there is other excellent work being done, by a great many other people, and to list them all would mean listing most of the presentations given at the conference. So, although I have highlighted just a few presentations, it does not detract from all the other work being done in this area. Indeed, the newly established IEEE Transactions journal in this area is a testament to how bouyant the area is.

Another highlight at CIG'09 was the competitions. This year they really seem to have come of age. In previous years (at both CIG and other conference) the competitions were very popular, and well received, but it just has a slightly different feel this time around.

At this year's conference there were four competitions:

• Screen-Capture Ms Pac-Man. There is also a new competition where you evolve the ghosts as well as control Pac-Man being planned. This should be up and running soon.
  
• The 2K Bot Prize
  
• The Defcon AI Competition
  
• Mario AI Competition
• The Simulated Car Racing Competition

I will try and blog about each one in the future.

We hope that the presentations from the symposium will be available to view soon. They were all recorded but there are some copyright issues to resolve.

The symposium will be run again in 2010. The venue has just about been decided but it needs to be rubber stamped so I cannot say on a public forum where it will be.

The 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games

I have just arrived in Milan for the 2009 CIG (Computational Intelligence and Games) conference. This was a conference that Simon Lucas and I started in 2005. Simon is now editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Computational Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Games. The 2005 conference, I believe, was partly responsible for paving the way to enabling this journal to be established. I am fortunate enough to serve as an Associate Editor for the journal.

As I said above, the first conference (actually it's a symposium, as the correct title is The IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games) was held in 2005 in Essex (UK). The original plan was to hold the symposium every two years, but it was so successful that we decided to hold it again in 2006. This time, Sushil Louis and I chaired it. It was held at the University of Reno in Nevada.

In 2007 it was held in Hawaii, as part of the then newly formed Computational Intelligence Symposium Series of conferences (CISS). Simon, again chaired this symposium, along with Sung-Bae Cho and Alan Blair. Actually, at the 2007 CISS, I chaired the associated scheduling conference (Computational Intelligence in Scheduling (CISched).

In 2008, CIG was held in Perth, Australia, chaired by my good friends Luigi Barone and Phil Hingston.

The sympsium has now moved to Milan (chaired by Pier Luca Lanzi). It has certainly done the rounds (Essex, Reno, Hawaii, Perth and Milan) and, having been to all of them, I know from first hand experience that it is going from strength to strength.

Looking at this years program it promises to be a very interesting week. If you have an interest in computational intelligence or games, take a look at http://www.ieee-cig.org/.