After many years of being held at Stanford University,this year’s AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligenceand Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) was

hosted by Northeastern University, courtesy of the NEUGame Design Program. One hundred forty-four participantsfrom 11 countries attended AIIDE 2013. The main programincluded 16 oral paper presentations, 16 posters, and 3demonstrations, with an acceptance rate of 27 percent for themain research track. Submissions were reviewed by four pro-gram committee members using a new strengths/weaknessesrating system designed to select papers with high potential toinfluence future game developers. In addition to the standardresearch track, authors had the option to report on commer-cial game development experiences by submitting abstractsto the Practitioner track. New to 2013, the conference fea-tured a Playable Experiences track for showcasing innovativeAI techniques in complete, polished games or artworks. Sub-missions to this track were reviewed on the basis of an inter-active media demonstration and an abstract; creators of ac-cepted playable experiences were invited to participate in apanel on the topic.

One of the highlights of the conference is the invitedspeaker series. This year AIIDE hosted four invited speakersrepresenting veterans of the computer game industry and

Conference Reports

SUMMER 2014 61Copyright © 2014, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. ISSN 0738-4602

The Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on

Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital

Entertainment (AIIDE): A Report

Gita Sukthankar, Ian Horswill

n The Ninth Annual AAAI Conferenceon Artificial Intelligence and InteractiveDigital Entertainment (AIIDE) was heldOctober 14–18, 2013, at NortheasternUniversity in Boston, Massachusetts.The mission of the AIIDE conference isto provide a forum for researchers andgame developers to discuss ways that AIcan enhance games and other forms ofinteractive entertainment. In additionto presentations on adapting standardAI techniques such as search, planning,and machine learning for use withingames, key topic areas include creatingrealistic autonomous characters, inter-active narrative, procedural content gen-eration, and integrating AI into gamedesign and production tools.

prominent academic game researchers. The year 2013also marked the fourth year of the AIIDE StarCraft AIcompetition. This competition is designed to fosterAI research applied to real-time strategy games byevaluating bots competing head to head in a fullgame of StarCraft: BroodWar.

Program DetailsWorkshops were held on the two days prior to thestart of the main conference, giving attendees achance to hold in-depth discussions on topics thatcomplement the themes of the main conference pro-gram. Short recaps of the workshops were presentedduring the first day of the main conference. This yearthe workshops included the First Workshop on AIand Game Aesthetics (1 day), the Second Workshopon AI in the Game Design Process (1 day), the SecondInternational Workshop on Musical Metacreation (2day), the Sixth Workshop on Intelligent NarrativeTechnologies (2 day). A separate report on theseworkshops also appears in this issue of AI Magazine.

In total, 53 papers were presented at the four work-shops, with a high percentage of the main conferenceattendees opting to attend the workshops. The over-all workshop program was very successful due to thehard work of the chairs and cochairs of all work-shops, their respective program committees, and at-tendees. The organizers of the Workshop on AI andGame Aesthetics hosted an evening event for thewhole community (DAGGER: Game Dev and Aca-demic Demo Night). The purpose of this social gath-ering was to give game developers and academic re-searchers an opportunity to demonstrate their workand play games together.

The main program started on Wednesday, October16, 2013, with a fascinating keynote talk by JohnAbercrombie (Irrational Games) about his work asteam lead developing the AI character Elizabeth forBioshock Infinite. His presentation focused on themyriad design decisions required to create a non-

player character (NPC) sidekick that is both interest-ing and reliable. Through movement, gesture, andutterance, the Elizabeth NPC subtly draws the play-er’s attention to useful clues and helpfully passesitems to the player like a real human team member.The talk was followed by paper presentations on theproblem of human modeling. Human modeling en-compasses a diverse set of issues ranging from recre-ating aspects of human behavior within a game AI tolearning models of player activity from game logs.

The afternoon opened with the second invitedtalk, which was delivered by Richard Evans (LindenLabs). Evans spoke about his work as cocreator of theVersu interactive storytelling system. The social sim-ulation that powers Versu enables the reader to ex-perience the same story from the perspective of dif-ferent characters. Characters in Versu are able toreason about social norms and select actions using aformalization of activity in a novel modal logic. Thistalk unveiled some of the knowledge representationand planning details behind Versu’s reusable socialpractices.

This invited talk was followed by a series of tech-nical paper presentations on social and affectivecomputing in games and shorter spotlight talks toadvertise posters. The final event of the day was theaward ceremony for the fourth annual StarCraft AIcompetition and competition summary, presentedby David Churchill and Michael Buro (University ofAlberta).

A conference reception was held Wednesdaynight. This year the reception included a soundtrackof computer-generated music that was provided bythe organizers of the Workshop on Musical Metacre-ation. As is traditional at AIIDE, awards were pre-sented for best paper, best student paper, and bestprogram committee member. This year, the best pa-per award went to Santiago Ontañón (Drexel Uni-versity) for his work on applying combinatorialmultibandit arm techniques to real-time strategygames. The best student paper was awarded to Anto-

Conference Reports

62 AI MAGAZINE

Figure 1. The AIIDE’13 Organizing Committee.

From left to right: Gita Sukthankar, Michael Mateas, Michael Buro, Julian Togelius, Gillian Smith, Adam Smith, Kevin Dill, Ian Horswill.Photo courtesy Vadim Bulitko and Emilie St. Hilaire.

nios Liapis (ITU Copenhagen) and his coauthorsGeorgios N. Yannakakis and Julian Togelius. MarkRiedl (Georgia Tech) received the best program com-mittee member award for his exemplary work in re-viewing AIIDE submissions.

Thursday’s sessions started with an invited talk byFox Harrell (MIT). Fox spoke about his research onidentity and semiotics in social media. His interactivenarrative, Mimesis, allows players to experiencecovert discrimination scenarios in an underwaterecosystem. This research serves as a potent reminderof how small design decisions can either reinforce ormitigate the perception of bias and discriminationwithin games.

The invited talk was followed by technical presen-tations on strategic AI. The primary focus of this ses-sion was improvements for Monte Carlo tree search(MCTS), including new sampling strategies and waysto integrate MCTS with knowledge-based methods.The talks spanned a variety of games, ranging fromcard games to StarCraft.

The afternoon sessions commenced with AleissiaLaidacker (Ubisoft Montreal) presenting her work onprocedural animation for Assassin’s Creed III. SinceAssassin’s Creed III is a very physical game that in-cludes avatars that can perform parkour movements,creating realistic physical animations is of para-mount importance for maintaining the verisimili-tude of the experience. Laidacker showed several ex-citing videos of the ACIII avatar scaling a windmilland running across steep, snowy terrain. The invitedtalk was followed by paper presentations on the top-ic of procedural content generation that introducednew techniques for the programmatic generation ofgame content such as game levels and maps. In thelate afternoon, Michael Mateas (UC Santa Cruz) mod-erated the Playable Experience track panel. The dayculminated with an evening reception featuringposters, demos, and industrial exhibitors.

Friday’s technical sessions included a talk from thepractitioner track, along with research track presen-tations on systems and evaluation. In some cases, cre-ating an effective evaluation protocol can be themost difficult part of the development process. Pre-senters spoke of the challenges of evaluating interac-tive narrative systems, game level generation, andsoftware architectures.

The conference concluded with the second AIIDEDoctoral Consortium (DC), which was free for all at-tendees. The purpose of the DC is to provide an op-portunity for doctoral students to present their re-search proposals to the community and to receivedetailed personal feedback from experienced men-tors. To ensure that the students have enough time tobenefit from the feedback, this year’s DC was specifi-cally targeted for doctoral students in the prepropos-al phase of their graduate programs. Partial travelfunding for participants was provided by a grantfrom Artificial Intelligence Journal.

Conference Reports

SUMMER 2014 63

The DC program accepted 10 students who pre-sented posters and short spotlight talks. In additionto student presentations, the DC also included a pan-el presentation from researchers who volunteered tospeak about their own career trajectories. This year’spanelists were: Michael Mateas (University of Cali-fornia, Santa Cruz), Julian Togelius (ITU Copen-hagen), and Jichen Zhu (Drexel). An important as-pect of the AIIDE mission is educating doctoralstudents, and the DC was very successful, thanks tothe efforts of the DC chairs and the enthusiasm ofthe participants.

The conference ended late Friday afternoon, send-ing the attendees their separate ways. Planning forAIIDE 2014 has commenced under the guidance ofIan Horswill (conference chair), Arnav Jhala (pro-gram chair), and Kevin Dill (industry relations). Of-ten we think of research advances as being a meansof enhancing human productivity, but AIIDE showsthe equally important ways that artificial intelligencecan bring entertainment, enjoyment, and new expe-riences into people’s lives.

AcknowledgmentsA large event such as AIIDE 2013 is a collective effort.Its success would not have been possible without ex-tensive support from Carol Hamilton and Keri Har-vey at AAAI. Magy Self El-Nasr (Northeastern Univer-sity) served as the local chair, and Kevin Dill(Lockheed Martin/Northeastern University) as thesponsorship chair. Northeastern University staff,Greg Houghton and Dara Lynn Pelechatz, assistedwith local conference arrangements. The workshopprogram was organized by the workshop chair, JulianTogelius (ITU Copenhagen). The AIIDE DoctoralConsortium was coorganized by Gillian Smith(Northeastern University) and Adam Smith (Univer-sity of Washington); the Artificial Intelligence Journalprovided partial travel funding for the doctoral men-toring participants. Michael Mateas (University ofCalifornia, Santa Cruz) acted as the chair for thePlayable Experiences track. The StarCraft AI competi-tion was chaired by Michael Buro and DavidChurchill (University of Alberta); prizes were spon-sored by Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. The conferenceprogram was organized by the program chair, IanHorswill (Northwestern University), and would nothave been possible without many hours spent by theprogram committee of 68 reviewers. The conferencewas chaired by Gita Sukthankar (University of Cen-tral Florida). We appreciate sponsorship by CharlesRiver Analytics (silver), DI-Guy (bronze), and Story-bricks.

Gita Sukthankar is an associate professor in the Depart-ment of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at theUniversity of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida, USA.

Ian Horswill is an associate professor of computer scienceat Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA.

Advertisement

64 AI MAGAZINE

Proceedings of theTwenty-Fourth

International Conference on Automated Planning

and Scheduling

2014

nretnIT

P

yefnoClanoitanhtruoF-y-tnewThttfoofsggsnngideecorP

ecnerhe

WhhWetS

auAno

iMdlRlreFnalA,neihCCheve

ybdetidE

gniludehcSdnanalPdetamotu

Dh,nr

ggninn

eehWWh

niMdna,lmuRrel

4102

oDh

omstroP

ihspmaHweN,htuo

4102enuJ62–12

ASUeri

Proceedings of the Eighth InternationalAAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

I CWSMUniversity of Michigan

Ann Arbor, Michigan USAJune 1–4, 2014

New Proceedingsfrom AAAI Presswww.aaai.org/Press/Proceedings