Event Details
26th May 2010
9:30am-5:30pm
Speakers
Speakers
The programme for GaME 2010 already includes some exciting talks from both industry and academia. Here are some of the speakers confirmed so far.

Peter Molyneux
Creative Director, Microsoft Game Studios Europe; Lionhead Studios

Peter Molyneux is one of the best-known names in the videogames industry, having produced a string of landmark games in his career as a designer and producer. Since 1997 he has worked at
Lionhead Games, a company which he founded to produce such ambitious titles as Black and White and Fable. Today, Molyneux works closely with Microsoft's new Natal technology, and continues to develop games at Lionhead.

The Use of Innovation in Creating Next Generation Entertainment.


Robin Baumgarten
PhD Student, Computational Creativity Group, Imperial College London

Robin Baumgarten is a
PhD student at Imperial College, and works applying artificial intelligence techniques to videogames in order to make them adapt to a player's ability and tastes. Robin has previously worked developing evolutionary artificial intelligences to play strategy games such as DEFCON, and has won awards for his applications of AI to videogames.

"Thank you, Pac-Man. But our Android is in another Silo."
Looking at four game related projects, this talk will highlight challenges and opportunities of combining video games, artificial intelligence, research and spare time projects during a PhD at Imperial. The projects include a collaboration with the Indie developer Introversion Games on an AI Interface to the thermonuclear war simulation game DEFCON, building the world's best autonomous Super Mario bot, analysing and classifying Pac-Man players, and finally earning some pocket money with an adaptive reaction game on the Android Market.


Richard Bates
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE)

Richard Bates has worked for Sony for over a decade, and was a founding member of the team that created the multi-million selling SingStar series for the Playstation consoles. Richard worked as lead programmer on a number of SingStar titles, and was recently behind the creation of an ingame store system for the series.

"The increasing challenges of cross-platform game development"
Video gaming systems have changed greatly since the first home consoles. Across the computer industry, CPU frequency growth has stalled and multicore solutions are becoming common, with GPGPU techniques also used for specialist high performance tasks. Typical game applications have a lot of general purpose code, and this lecture will explore the challenges that game developers face when developing such code on highly varying, and rapidly changing, architectures.


Andy Davison
Imperial College London

Andrew Davison is a Reader in Robot Vision at Imperial College London, where his work involves studies into the use of SLAM, a mapping technique for robots. Recent work involves highly sophisticated three-dimensional mapping techniques that can be done in real-time using a simple handheld camera.

Live Tracking and Reconstruction From Video
Recent advances in probabilistic Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms, together with modern computer power, have made it possible to create practical systems able to perform real-time estimation of the motion of a camera in 3D purely from the image stream it acquires. This is of interest in many application fields, including robotics, wearable computing and augmented reality. I will explain the main aspects of the algorithms behind visual SLAM techniques, and present recent work which is now turning towards not just estimating camera motion but also recovering dense scene models in real-time, enabling advanced augmented reality where virtual objects can physically interact with the real scene.


Gwaredd Mountain
Climax Group


Gwaredd Mountain has worked at Climax Group for over a decade, where he has been responsible for developing key titles such as Viva Pinata and the Overlord series. A highly experienced programmer and project manager, Mountain has developed for every major gaming platform over the last ten years.

"Shooting The Barman"
This talk introduces the field of "interactive narrative" and some of the difficulties and conflicting interests for storytelling within the context of a computer game. It will cover previous related research, the current state of storytelling in contemporary games and challenges for the future.


Gordon MacLachlan
Imagination Technologies

Biography coming soon.

"Optimising for Today's Mobile Graphics Acceleration"
The graphics capabilities of today's smartphones and other handhelds are tremendous especially when compared to the technology of the past. However, even the most powerful hardware cannot perform to its potential without correct use. This lecture will describe the best techniques for well-performing mobile graphics and identify some of the pitfalls that can hurt such development. Content will address good practice common to graphics acceleration in general, with specific recommendations for utilising the dominant architecture in the field.


Etienne Burdet
Imperial College, London

Dr. Etienne Burdet is a
Reader in Human Robotics at Imperial College. His academic life has spanned the fields of physics, mathematics, neuroscience and now computing, and today his research interests are mostly focused on human-machine interaction. His work includes research into assistive devices and the use of virtual reality to facilitate rehabilitation.

"Rules of Mechanical Virtual Reality and Therapeutic Games for Neurorehabilitation"
This talk will first present the results of experiments to understand how humans control their arm. By investigating the adaptation of arm movements to computer-controlled force fields produced by a robotic interface, we have been able to decipher the main properties of motor adaptation. We use this knowledge to develop intuitive robotic systems for neurorehabilitation after stroke. While it is not yet known whether and how much such systems help recovery after stroke, our experience has shown that patients are motivated using them in a game-like environment. An important task consists of developing such therapeutic video games to provide optimal recovery of motor functions.





Contact
If you have any enquiries, please contact Paul Kelly at game@doc.ic.ac.uk