Call For Papers – IEEE CEC 2021 – Special Session on Games

Paper Submission Deadline: 31 January 2021

Special session website: https://gamesatcec21.github.io/

Submission website: https://cec2021.mini.pw.edu.pl/en/paper-submission

Please, select SS-13. Games when submitting your paper.

Organisers:

Alexander Dockhorn, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London (a.dockhorn@qmul.ac.uk),

Chiara Sironi, Department of Data Science & Knowledge Engineering, Maastricht University (c.sironi@maastrichtuniversity.nl),

Joseph Alexander Brown, Artificial Intelligence in Games Development Lab, Innopolis University (j.brown@innopolis.ru)

This special session is organised in association with the IEEE CIS Games Technical Committee (GTC).

Aim

Games are an ideal domain to study Computational Intelligence (CI) methods as they provide affordable, competitive, dynamic, reproducible environments suitable for testing new search algorithms, pattern-based evaluation methods, and learning concepts. Games scale from simple problems for developing algorithms to incredibly hard problems for testing algorithms They are also interesting to observe, fun to play, and attractive to students. Additionally, there is the potential for CI methods to improve the design and development of computer games, tabletop games, board games, and puzzles. This special session aims at gathering leaders and neophytes in games research as well as practitioners in this field who research applications of computational intelligence methods to computer games.

Scope

In general, papers are welcome that consider all kinds of applications of methods (evolutionary computation, supervised or unsupervised learning, fuzzy systems, game-tree search, rolling horizon algorithms, Monte Carlo tree search, generative adversarial networks, etc.) to games (card games, board games, mathematical games, action games, strategy games, role-playing games, arcade games, serious games, etc.). Examples include but are not limited to:

∙      Adaptation Automatic game testing

∙      Coevolution Comparative studies (e.g. CI versus human-designed players)

∙      Dynamic difficulty

∙      Games as test-beds for algorithms

∙      Imitating human players

∙      Learning to play games

∙      Multi-agent and multi-strategy learning

∙      Player/opponent modelling

∙      CI for serious games (e.g., games for health care, education or training)

∙      Results of game-based CI and open competitions

∙      Mathematical games and agents to play them

∙      Automatic/Procedural content generation

∙      Evaluation of Generated Content

∙      Game and puzzle design with computational intelligence

∙      Representation of knowledge in agents

∙      Team AI

∙      Game AI for decision making and planning

Important Dates

Please note that the list below serves as a rough guide. The dates may be changed due to changes by the organizing committee. You can find the latest information at: https://cec2021.mini.pw.edu.pl/en/important-dates.

31 January 2021 – Paper Submission Deadline

22 March 2021 – Paper Acceptance Notification

7 April 2021 – Final Paper Submission Deadline

7 April 2021 – Early Registration Deadline

28 June 2021-1 July 2021 – Conference Dates

About the organisers

Alexander Dockhorn is post-doctoral research associate at the Queen Mary University of London. He received his PhD at the Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg in 2020. His research focuses on forward model learning methods and the analysis of prediction-based search agents in games with a special interest in partial-information games. He is active member of the IEEE in which he serves as the chair of the IEEE CIS Competitions Sub-Committe and recently joined as a member of the Games Technical Committee (GTC). Since 2017, he is organizing the Hearthstone AI competition to foster comparability of AI agents in card games.

∙      Personal webpage: https://adockhorn.github.io/

Chiara F. Sironi is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Data Science & Knowledge Engineering at Maastricht University, where she also received the Ph.D. degree in 2019. Her research focuses on on-line learning of search control for Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). She is using General Game Playing (GGP) as the main application domain and is also interested in applications to General Video Game Playing (GVGP). She participated in the organization of the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG2018) as local chair and is currently a member of the Games Technical Committee (GTC) | IEEE Computational Intelligence Society.

∙      Personal webpage: https://dke.maastrichtuniversity.nl/c.sironi/

Joseph Alexander Brown (S’09-M’14-SM’19) was born in Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON, Canada, on July 6, 1985. He received the B.Sc. (Hons.) with first class standing in computer science with a concentration in software engineering, and M.Sc. in computer science from Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada in 2007 and 2009, respectively. He received the Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Guelph in 2014. He also holds a к.ф.-м.н. issued by the Russian Higher Degree Attestation Committee in 2019. He previously worked for Magna International Inc. as a Manufacturing Systems Analyst and as a visiting researcher at ITU Copenhagen. He is currently an Assistant Professor and head of the Artificial Intelligence in Games Development Lab at Innopolis University in Innopolis, Republic of Tatarstan, Russia and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada. He was the proceedings chair for the IEEE 2013 Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games (CIG), local arrangements chair for the 2015, special sessions chair for the 2017, and tutorial chair for the 2018, Symposium on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CIBCB). He sits as a member of the Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Technical Committee (BBTC) and is Vice Chair of the Technical Committee in Games (GTC) of the Computational Intelligence Society (CIS) of the IEEE.

∙      Personal webpage: https://old.innopolis.university/en/about/professors/joseph-brown/