November Meeting

UPDATE: Video of this meeting is available online!

This month’s Boston Post-Mortem is fast approaching! We’re meeting on Wednesday, November 18 at 7pm at The Skellig in Waltham. We’re featuring an exciting panel of experienced game artificial intelligence experts!

The panel will be answering your game AI related questions that are sent in advance as well as a few asked at the meeting itself.  If you have any game AI related questions that you would in particular like the panel to address at Post-Mortem, please e-mail them to bostongameai@gmail.com ASAP.  (Any questions received after the 14th will be unlikely to have prepared answers.)

The panel consists of the people behind the AI systems of such renowned titles as Halo 2 and 3, F.E.A.R., and Bioshock. Feel free to send in questions that may pertain to the AI systems from these or any of the other games the panel has worked on in the past!  In addition to answering your game AI questions, the panel will also address some current issues in the past, present, and future of game AI.  The panel will discuss some of the pressing issues of the moment and where game AI needs to go to address these issues.

The panel will consist of:

Christian Baekkelund (moderator)
Christian Baekkelund has worked games-related jobs in the areas of design, programming, and QA, at Electronic Arts, for the British school system, briefly at Harmonix, and most recently at 38 Studios.  Between various jobs, he attended MIT, studying computer science and Comparative Media Studies, focusing on games and AI.  Christian has also spoken at the Game Developers Conference and written in the AI Programming Wisdom series of books about AI, learning methods, and game design.

John Abercrombie (panelist)
John Abercrombie was the AI Lead on BIOSHOCK and SWAT 4 and is now the Lead Programmer on 2K Boston’s unannounced title. He graduated from Brandeis University with a degree in Computer Science in 2000, and has worked at Irrational Games / 2K Boston ever since.

Damián Isla (panelist)
Damián Isla has been working on and writing about game technology for almost a decade.  Recently, he helped found Moonshot Games, a studio dedicated to the creation of downloadable games with triple-A production values and technology.  Before Moonshot, Damián was AI and Gameplay engineering lead at Bungie Studios, where he was responsible for the AI for the mega-hit first-person shooters Halo 2 and Halo 3.

An expert in the field of Artificial Intelligence for Games, Damián has spoken on games, AI and character technology at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), at the AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE), and at Siggraph, and is a frequent speaker at the Game Developers Conference (GDC).

Before joining the industry, Damián earned a Masters Degree at the M.I.T. Media Lab, where he did research on learning and behavior for synthetic characters. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science, also from M.I.T. 

Jeff Orkin (panelist)
Jeff Orkin is a PhD candidate in the Cognitive Machines Group at the MIT Media Lab. Jeff’s research focuses on Artificial Intelligence for characters that learn to communicate and collaborate by observing humans playing online multiplayer games. 

Prior to enrolling at the Media Lab, Jeff developed several generations of AI systems in the game industry. As a Senior Engineer at Monolith Productions, Jeff focused on goal-oriented autonomous character behavior and planning, while developing AI systems for the award winning titles No One Lives Forever 2 and F.E.A.R. 

Jeff is a Contributing Author and Section Editor of the AI Game Programming Wisdom book series, has presented at the Game Developer’s Conference, the AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference (AIIDE), and the Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Sytems (AAMAS) conference, and holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington and Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Tufts University with a minor in Studio Art.

Logistics:
Wednesday, November 18 @7pm
The Skellig, Waltham (directions)